In India, implementation of the Foundation’s water projects is secured by our strategic partner, Sunlit Future. Sunlit Future is essentially a technology provider that specialises in building solar solutions. They are based in Auroville, an international township in the Villipuram district of Tamil Nadu in Southeast India. Long-term community engagement (sanitation and hygiene training, community mobilisation and development) is secured by local development NGOs who know the local population very well and stay for a long time in the areas.
From 2015 – 2018, we provided access to safe drinking water for 34,000 inhabitants in 101 rural tribal underprivileged villages in the states of Odisha (65 villages) Madhya Pradesh (9 villages) and Maharashtra (26 villages) and in the Spiti Valley in the Himalaya (1 village). We collaborated with our strategic partner, Sunlit Future and several local NGO’s working in those areas: The Foundation and Sunlit Future delivered the solar driven pump setup, while the local NGO was responsible for ensuring piping, tap stands and sanitation with funding from other sources.
As of 2019, we focus on improving the collaboration model before reaching out to new villages
- In the first half of 2019, all 101 villages will be revisited to repair and upgrade the systems and retrain the communities. Based on this work we will make clearer standards for the division of responsibilities between the different partners
- From June 2019, we will add 89 new water projects in the states of Odisha (75 villages) and Maharashtra (10) and in Spiti Valley in Himalaya (4)
Programme manager Nils Thorup visited the village Kotagarh block in Odisha in February 2018 to inspect the installations
Co-funding is a given
Projects in India are only partly funded by the Poul Due Jensen Foundation. Sunlit Future and their NGO partners also cooperateswith Tata Trusts (a large industrial foundation in India) and the Indian authorities, who almost by default finance the sanitation installations under a Government program in the villages where we bring in access to water.
- In previous years, approximately 3.6M DKK have been granted towards the programme.
- In 2018, the Foundation has committed another 6.6m DKK towards the programme
