Kenya RAPID Garissa Team: (from left) Sam Ombeki, Thomas Ihura, Daniel Kitinga, and Shirwaa Noor
Note: On World Water Day 2024, CARE’s Water Team Director sent out a special email (see below) to all CARE colleagues recognizing the systems strengthening work of CARE’s Niger Hamzari team. Congratulations to the CARE Niger and Niger Hamzari teams!
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Dear CARE colleagues and partners,
This Friday, March 22, is World Water Day! As always, raise a glass of clean water in gratitude, and celebrate!
This year’s World Water Day theme is “Water for Peace.” Across the world, and in the communities in which CARE works, climate change, conflict, and human activities are leading to growing water insecurity – creating tension between people and communities and threatening livelihoods, security, and the health of ecosystems. By 2030, more than half of the world’s population will live with water scarcity (UN Water), and an estimated 700 million people may be displaced due to extreme water insecurity in their communities (UNICEF).
Water insecurity is a driver of tension, but water is also a means for peace. Throughout history, water has been a catalyst for cooperation and peace-making far more often than a driver of conflict (A. Wolf, 2023). For CARE, strengthening water security – and ensuring that communities have the capacities to safeguard sustainable access to sufficient and safe water for livelihoods, health, well-being, economic development, and regenerative ecosystems – is foundational to promoting peace, and core to our work.
This year, we are proud to present CARE’s Annual WASH Systems award to the Hamzari WASH team in Niger! For nearly six years, this amazing team – a collaboration between CARE and WaterAid – has strengthened commune government and private operator capacities and demonstrated new partnership models that have helped to increase access to water for more than 70,000 people, increase basic sanitation access for 22,000 people, and protect watersheds that ensure water in quantity, quality, and perpetuity across 3 communes. Hamzari is a USAID-funded Resilience Food Security Activity (RFSA), and these successes demonstrate the tremendous opportunity for multi-sector investments like RFSAs to integrate WASH and water resources management and link water security, food security, livelihoods and resilience for lasting stability. This is the first time that a RFSA program has won our WASH Systems Award!
Please join us in congratulating the Hamzari WASH team and read more about their work in our 2024 WASH Systems Award brief. Please feel free to share this email and brief with your networks to raise awareness and expand our learning.
To our CARE teams and partners across the world working in water security, sanitation, hygiene – thank you for the important work you do! Your work is essential to protecting the health, livelihoods, dignity, well-being and security of everyone, and foundational to promoting peace.
Happy World Water Day to all!
With gratitude,
The CARE Water+ Team