CharitiesEvidence Action: Safe Water Now
Evidence Action: Safe Water Now
Charity

Evidence Action

Safe Water Now

Safe Water Now increases access to safe water by treating water with chlorine so that it's safe to drink

Global health and wellbeing

What problem is Safe Water Now working on?

Over 2 billion people lack access to water that is safe to drink, and unsafe water is responsible for more than one million deaths each year. Unsafe drinking water is a leading risk factor for infectious diseases, exacerbates malnutrition, and is the most common cause of diarrhoea — the world’s second-leading cause of child mortality.

This is a particular problem in poor rural areas, where people rely on open springs and shallow wells that are easily contaminated by human and animal waste. But according to the World Health Organization, treating water with diluted chlorine is a safe and effective way to improve water quality.

What does Safe Water Now do?

Safe Water Now programming in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, and India uses innovative, low-cost approaches like chlorine dispensers and automatic in-line chlorination. With local government and community buy-in, the program reports reaching nearly 10 million people with safe water access and having saved the lives of more than 15,000 children under 5 years old. Now, Safe Water Now is scaling in partnership with the Government of India to reach tens of millions more.

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of Safe Water Now?1.

For information about the cost-effectiveness of this intervention, see GiveWell’s 2022 grant report.

Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).

At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.

We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things:

  • When we include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this may not be the only evidence that exists. It is simply the evidence the GWWC research team has at this time.
  • When we don’t include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this does not necessarily mean there is no such information. However, it does mean the GWWC research team isn’t privy to any more information at this time.