Member Profile: Pure Water for the World

Lack of clean, safe drinking water is a global problem that we're helping to solve. We help the rural poor in developing countries have clean, safe drinking water, giving them health and hope that leads to opportunity.

PWW has now installed individual sand filters to serve more than 700,000 people. We have 9 projects operating throughout Honduras; 2 in Haiti, 2 in El Salvador, and are in the process of initiating projects in the, Dominican Republic and Guatemala. We have 23 people working in country on our projects plus 6 technically trained volunteers, in addition to assistance from Peace Corp volunteers.
Our program emphasizes education as a critical component of any program trying to provide clean, safe drinking water. We also provide hygiene and sanitation education, parasitic treatment and follow up monitoring. In order to create jobs in country we build concrete filters at each project site where they are used. In Haiti, PWW’s filter factory employees 30 Haitians many of whom did not have a decent job before. We also have developed a plastic filter that can be transported more easily to the rural population and can be made in country on a portable molding machine. Besides slow sand filters for individuals and community based sand filters, PWW has also done solar pasteurization, and is looking at setting up a rain water harvesting program. We are expanding the technologies that we bring to each situation so that we can provide cost effective and appropriate technologies to solve the problems of that community.

The roots of PWW began in 1994 when a dentist from the Brattleboro, Vermont Rotary Club volunteered to go to a small Salvadoran village to provide medical services. He was moved by the poor living conditions and vowed to make a difference and do something. With the support of his Rotary Club he decided to help the people by providing rural villages with potable water. The success and interest of the club’s activities soon outgrew the capacity of the Rotary Club. As a result, Pure Water for the World, Inc. was set up as a 501(c) (3) organization to carry out this important humanitarian effort in 1999.
PWW worked to identify a system that would best fit the demands of the rural villages and the people that the organization first sought to serve. After much effort and investigation PWW focused on individual sand filters that would go into each families home and PWW developed an educational component and follow up to insure the success of the installed sand filters. Although the initial efforts were in El Salvador, most of the recent efforts have been in Honduras and Haiti. PWW is now expanding into other countries after being recognized as the leading organization dealing with providing clean, safe drinking water to the rural populations. The household sand filters have made a huge difference in the villages, schools and homes where PWW has been able to install them. Where filters are in use the crying from stomach pains, death, and poor school attendance are a thing of the past.