Excerpt from the award memo for CARE Ethiopia’s Water+ team, March 2020
Note: On World Water Day 2020, CARE’s Water Team Director sent out a special email (see below) to all CARE colleagues recognizing the systems strengthening work of CARE Ethiopia and CARE Madagascar. Congratulations to CARE Ethiopia’s WATER+ Team and CARE Madagascar’s RANO WASH team!
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Dear CARE colleagues,
Today (March 22) is World Water Day! This year, wash your hands thoroughly with soap, and raise a glass of safe drinking water in celebration!
Today, let us applaud the CARE Water+ teams and colleagues all over the world for the contribution they make to SDG#6 and to CARE’s larger mission – to reducing social injustice and inequality, and improving the lives of women and girls around the world (SDG#5).
CARE programs in more than 50 countries are working to protect water resources and improve access to water and sanitation for health, hygiene, nutrition, agricultural production, income generation, resilience and well-being. In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, and the importance of hygiene as the first defense against spread of the disease, CARE’s work to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in homes, schools and health institutions has taken on an even greater significance. Now, as clearly as ever, WASH is fundamental to saving lives and protecting the most vulnerable.
To our Water+ colleagues around the world, THANK YOU for the important work you do.
We are proud to announce two winners of our 2nd annual WASH Systems Change Award. Please join us in congratulating CARE Ethiopia’s WATER+ Team and CARE Madagascar’s RANO WASH team! Both teams have worked persistently to strengthen WASH governance, improve service quality, increase public and private investment, inspire sustained behavior change, and find scalable and sustainable models for extending WASH services to rural, remote, and vulnerable communities. Sustainable WASH requires far more than infrastructure. Thank you to the CARE Ethiopia WATER+ team and the CARE Madagascar RANO WASH team for pushing tirelessly towards the broader systems change needed to ensure sustainable WASH, and everything that enables! Learn more about their work in the short briefs, by clicking these links: Ethiopia and Madagascar.
Finally, please read our Water+ 2019 Annual Report for a retrospective and lessons learned from CARE’s Water+ work in 2019. It has been an eventful year.
Wishing you all WASH, health and happiness!
The CARE Water+ Team
Stephanie Ogden | CARE USA | Water Team Director