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The Peer Water Exchange (PWX) is a participatory decision-making system to select, fund, manage, monitor, and share grassroots water and sanitation projects worldwide efficiently, effectively, and transparently. PWX is a Web 2.0 application, concieved and created before the phrase "Web 2.0" was in use!
Local, grassroots projects are the key to solving the global water crisis in rural and remote areas. These diverse efforts involve community ownership, sanitation, hygiene education, change in behavior, and long-term maintenance and evaluation -- unlike vaccination programs -- and thus have historically been hard to scale. Today we have solutions to solve our drinking water problems, but not the infrastructure to fund, select, manage, monitor, and share these grassroots, community solutions.
Blue Planet Run Foundation's (BPRF) founding goal was to bring safe drinking water to 200 million people by 2027. BPRF estimated that it would need to select, fund, and manage over 40,000 water projects and, not desiring to create a large program office, found itself stuck. PWX was conceived to address the deficiencies of the current mechanisms, especially their inability to scale up. As the parent, BPRF uses PWX as its program arm to successfully select, fund, implement, and assess water projects around the world.
PWX is a platform, process, and human network for funding, soliciting, selecting, managing, and evaluating water projects worldwide. It distributes the work to eliminate bottlenecks and helps people do the work that they are best at, while eliminating bureaucracy and paperwork. Most importantly, it reduces competitive behavior and increases cooperation and knowledge sharing. Thus, PWX is the first social entrepreneurship project that requires changes at the entire value chain of philanthropy: from the foundation/donor to the grassroots implementer.
We empower grassroots implementers by using
an innovative combination of people, process, and technology to allow them to
participate in the decision-making process.
PWX creates a live knowledge-base of
all the work done, communication exchanged, and showcases
both successes and failures from around the world.
We enable field-level low-cost resources to assess the long-term impact of the work.
PWX will change the existing funding and management model by:
Through PWX, implementer, funder, and observer organizations form a global collaborative network while focusing on their core competency. Funder organizations focus on raising money and overseeing systemic issues; implementers select projects, implement solutions, evaluate each other's work, and share their successes and failures; and observers help with assessing long-term impact.
The book Blue Planet Run has a chapter on PWX, its origins and philosophy, and how it works. The chapter is appropriately titled 'Water 2.0'.
