The Water Resilience Coalition (WRC), a CEO-driven initiative focused on tackling the worldwide water crisis, is making significant strides by launching the Women + Water Collaborative, a groundbreaking corporate collective action program aimed at enhancing access to clean water and sanitation in India.
In a remarkable show of solidarity and cross-sector collaboration, Gap Inc., Cargill, and GSK, in partnership with WaterAid and the Water Resilience Coalition, have come together to spearhead this initiative, with the goal of improving health, livelihoods, and climate resilience in water-stressed communities across India. The project's initial focus will be on the Krishna and Godavari river basins. Notably, the WRC is part of the CEO Water Mandate, a partnership between the UN Global Compact and the Pacific Institute.
Pioneering Cross-Sector Collaboration for Water Resilience
This historic collaboration marks the first time that companies from diverse sectors, including apparel, biopharma, and agriculture, have joined forces with shared objectives, metrics, and governance to provide clean water and sanitation access in the same communities. Building on the success of the previous USAID Gap Inc. Women + Water Alliance, which empowered over 2.4 million people in India to improve their access to water and sanitation between 2017 and 2023, this initiative is one of 21 collective action projects underway in 15 basins across Asia, Africa, South America, and North America. These projects are part of the Water Resilience Coalition's ambitious 2030 goal to establish water resilience across 100 Priority Basins.
The Women + Water Collaborative's primary objectives are to enhance the availability and quality of water in priority river basins through water replenishment and conservation practices, such as rainwater harvesting. It will also provide communities with safe drinking water and climate-resilient sanitation and hygiene infrastructure and services. Recognizing the crucial role that women in rural India play in water collection and usage, this program seeks to empower women's leadership to bolster water resilience, improve water security, and ensure equitable access to water and sanitation for communities on a significant scale.
Leadership and Commitment: Uniting for Global Water Resilience
Sanda Ojiambo, CEO and Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact and Co-Chair of the Water Resilience Coalition, emphasized the importance of collaboration in achieving the ambitious goals of the WRC's 2030 strategy. She said, "As part of the Forward Faster Water Resilience Target and as members of the Water Resilience Coalition, the companies involved in this initiative have joined an alliance that thrives on collaboration and collective action."
Dan Fibiger, the Head of Global Sustainability at Gap Inc., emphasized the company's dedication to pioneering innovative programs. He highlighted how the Women + Water Collaborative builds on Gap Inc.'s track record of creating inventive initiatives in collaboration with nonprofits and the public sector. These efforts involve mobilizing corporate partners to drive sustainability on a large scale, particularly by uniting actors from the food, fashion, and biopharma sectors. Similarly, Michelle Grogg, the Vice President of Corporate Responsibility at Cargill, stressed the significance of forming partnerships and fostering collective action to enhance access to safe drinking water and sanitation. She underlined that partnerships and collective endeavors are pivotal in achieving their ambitions, expressing Cargill's satisfaction in being an active participant in the Women + Water Collaborative.
WaterAid will launch the program in five Indian states and six priority districts, and they are actively seeking additional corporate partners to expand their reach. Kelly Parsons, CEO of WaterAid America, underscored the urgent need for corporate collaboration to solve the water crisis and achieve sustainable development goals. She said, "We know that solving the water crisis is a business imperative. We also know that none of the sustainable development goals will be achieved without global collaboration and partnership. By coordinating large, multi-stakeholder partnerships, we create a holistic impact at scale. That's the power of collective action."
About the Water Resilience Coalition
The Water Resilience Coalition is a CEO-led initiative driven by industry leaders. Its mission is to prioritize the global water stress crisis within the corporate agenda and work towards preserving the world's freshwater resources through collective action in water-stressed basins, along with ambitious, quantifiable commitments. Since its launch in 2020, 35 global companies from various sectors, with a combined market capitalization of US$4.8 trillion, and operations in over 140 countries, have joined this vital effort.