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The African Ministers' Council on Water, an initiative of the African Union, has announced a three-year, $2 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build its capacity for sanitation policy development, monitoring and evaluation coverage, and WASH-related advocacy across the continent.
Awarded through the foundation's global development program, the grant will be used to provide training and technical assistance in four countries working to develop and adopt effective sanitation and hygiene policies and plans; organize the fourth AfricaSan conference as a mechanism for tracking progress, refining targets, and enabling peer support and advocacy for implementation of the 2008 eThekwini Declaration and AfricaSan Action Plan; and help countries fulfill their obligations to report to the AU.
"We face tremendous challenges of diminishing access to clean water and safe sanitation," said AMCOW executive secretary Bai Mass Taal. "AMCOW is committed to working with partners such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to reduce this scourge and improve access to safe sanitation, thereby achieving our overall goal of decreasing poverty and disease in the continent."
Source: “African Ministers' Council on Water (AMCOW) Gets US$2 Million Grant to Improve Sanitation Coverage in Africa.” African Ministers' Council on Water Press Release 12/18/12.
The University of Toronto has announced a $2.2 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in support of ongoing efforts to design a waterless hygienic toilet that is safe and affordable for people in the developing world.
Engineering professor Yu-Ling Cheng, director of the Centre for Global Engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, and her team, which includes researchers from Western University and the University of Queensland, placed third in the Gates Foundation's Reinvent the Toilet Challenge last August. Working with partners in Bangladesh, Cheng's team hopes to build an operational prototype by December 2013 that uses readily available materials and equipment that can be maintained locally.
The team's solution uses a sand filter and UV disinfection to process liquid waste and a smolder chamber — similar to a charcoal barbeque — to incinerate solid waste that has been flattened and dried in a roller/belt assembly. The team will work to further simplify the process, reduce mechanical complexity of the device, and minimize odor.
"I am very proud of our entire team and the work we have done up to now," said Cheng. "We have proven that our concept works technically; now we are going to get busy to make sure it will work for the users — some of the 2.6 billion people in the world who do not have access to basic sanitation."
Source: “U of T Engineers Awarded $2.2 Million Grant for Toilet Research.” University of Toronto Press Release 11/28/12.
For additional WASH-related philanthropy news, see the news feed on WASHfunders.org.
In the first data refresh since WASHfunders’ launch on October 19, 2011, 129 new grants have been added to the site’s funding map. These grant monies were awarded between 2009 and 2011 by 40 foundations to nearly 100 unique organizations and represent more than $48 million in funding for WASH projects globally. Newly added grants can be easily viewed by clicking on the “new additions” option on the funding map.
The Foundation Center’s grants database is updated on an ongoing basis, as new grants information becomes available and is coded by the Center’s indexing staff. Grants information is collected through a variety of means, including from foundations themselves via quarterly electronic grant reporting (the Center’s mechanism for obtaining the most current and complete information about foundation grantmaking) and from IRS forms. In addition, as the Foundation Center expands its global reach, new grants from foundations outside the U.S. are regularly being added to the database.
In fact, five of the 40 foundations represented among the new grants are foundations outside of the U.S. For example, the Pro Victimis Foundation, based in Switzerland, awarded six grants totaling more than $630,000 in support of clean water projects, including projects in Guatemala and El Salvador. The King Baudouin Foundation, based in Belgium, awarded 14 grants for WASH efforts, amounting to more than $540,000.
Moving forward, grants data will be updated on a monthly basis, so keep making those return visits to WASHfunders to see where foundations are directing their grant dollars.
As always, if you don’t see your grants represented or if you have any feedback for us, send us a note at washfunders@foundationcenter.org.
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