Waterharvest

WaterHarvest (formerly Wells for India) is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1987. We provide grant funding and technical support for water-based rural development projects. WaterHarvest works with rural communities to harvest the monsoon rains, enabling the poorest people to reap the benefits of safer and sustainable water. We implement low-cost, sustainable solutions combining our technical expertise with traditional wisdom, to capture and store precious monsoon rain (i.e. water harvesting). Over the past 30 years, simple but highly effective harvesting structures have aided us to help the maximum number of people with the minimum of funding. At WaterHarvest we never seek to impose solutions, either on our partners or on beneficiaries. The projects we support are designed using participatory (also known as “demand-led”) methods, involving people in planning and taking action for their own future. We believe that any support we provide must not encourage any sense of dependency among the communities where we work. Since the first projects we supported, villagers have made in-kind contributions to the work such as co-investment, donating land, or, more usually, their labour. This encourages a sense of long-term ownership and responsibility, rather than short-term dependency on handouts. In order to sustain our water harvesting systems, we also support beneficiaries to form and run village development committees which manage natural resources responsibly and plan collectively for their community’s future. Community funds are set up to maintain ongoing repairs of the water harvesting structures which are built using affordable materials available locally. Beneficiaries also receive training to develop various skills such as farming, masonry and business. All of our projects are independently evaluated to check whether they have achieved the planned impacts.