The Coca Cola Foundation and its partners are working with local African governments to build infrastructure that supplies clean drinking water and sanitation facilities. These efforts are meant to minimize the spread of disease and empower local communities with educational opportunity and economic prosperity.
Dr. Susan Mboya is the President of the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation and the Group Director of the Eurasia Africa Group (EAG) for women’s economic empowerment at Coca-Cola. She leads the Groups deployment of the “5 BY 20” initiative, a global Commitment by Coca-Cola to economically empower 5 million women by the year 2020 and is responsible for the development of strategic plans and initiatives in the 90+ countries that make up the Eurasia Africa Group. Susan has raised over $116 million in funding towards the 5by20 initiative to date and is working with international partners including USAID, DFID, Technoserve, MercyCorps and the IFC. She is also the First Lady of Nairobi County, in Kenya.
Why has the Coca Cola Foundation created the Replenish Africa Initiative (RAIN) program and what are some of the challenges the organization is addressing?
At the highest level, the challenge is to make water available on a predictable and steady basis throughout Africa. The program is in response to the severe water challenges faced by more than 300 million people living in Africa.
The initiative was introduced by the Coca Cola Foundation (TCCAF) in 2009 with an original financial commitment of $30 million. The first goal we set was to provide access to safe water for 2 million people by the end of 2015. I’m happy to say we met that goal. We’ve since expanded the goal to include an additional 4 million people by 2020, bringing the total to 6 million people.
This program also has a focus on economically empowering up to 550,000 women and youth and promoting health and hygiene in communities and at schools and health centers. We know that improving sustainable safe access to water is linked to health, nutrition, education, and economy.
What is RAIN’s unique approach for positively engaging with the African communities and stakeholders?
Keep in mind that the Coca Cola Foundation is a separate entity from the corporation. This enables us to work with many partner organizations that have already established a presence on the ground in Africa. This means that when we go into a community to help, we work with that community on these efforts.
In the early stages, we talk with community leaders about roles and responsibilities. After the program is implemented, we train the community and hand over the program to that community to maintain. For example, if we put in a bore hole, we train the members of that community to maintain it. We also train them on how to run the program with basic management programs.
Another task we take on is setting up a water management board comprised of community members who can be responsible for the program going forward. We work with them to determine costs and establish governance for a particular water source. We do everything we can to leave the community empowered and ready to successfully continue the program.
What are the specific water, sanitation, and hygiene needs of the communities you serve and how do you address those needs?
Communities are quite diverse and each communities needs differ. Water plays a huge role. Nutrition and safe drinking water are most critical.
Many of the diseases we struggle with in Africa like Malaria and Cholera are tied to whether or not people can access safe drinking water and whether or not appropriate sanitation facilities are in place. Based on statistics, we know that 80% of the sicknesses in Africa are caused by wash-related diseases.
Things like sanitation are taken for granted in other parts of the world but not in Africa. It is a huge problem. Teaching safe sanitation habits goes a long way to preventing diseases from spreading.
One of the programs we initiated is called Water for Schools http://www.tccaf.org/africa-water-projects-schools.asp . The program is in conjunction with the Department of Basic Education in the Republic of South Africa. There are 100 schools involved with the program who will benefit from clean drinking water, improved sanitation, and training on hygiene.
Without these facilities, girls are left out at least one week a month. This lack of sanitation contributes to the absenteeism we see with girls. People don’t realize that something as simple as access to sanitation facilities affects the number of African girls who can attend school each month. Women and children’s educational opportunities and therefore their livelihood the economic potential of families and communities are at risk.
In addition to the goals I mentioned earlier, we also have the goal to replenish 18.5 billion liters of water to the communities we serve. Coca Cola products are water intensive and we want to make sure that we replenish any resources we use.
Returning 18.5 million liters of water is a large infrastructure undertaking. Is there a particular example driving the Coca Cola Foundation and its partners to move quickly on this goal?
Water equals life. Every day without access to clean water is critical to the people of Africa.
This goal is being met by the REPLENISH program. Commitment to the REPLENISH program is mandatory to healing the region and all the problems that happen when safe drinking water and sanitation are not available.
We know that there is a clear link between water and health, and it’s not just the impacts of safe drinking water. Last year when the Ebola crisis was at its highest, we worked with bottlers in Liberia to provide access to water in the hardest hit areas. Two things happened during the crisis to make it worse, dehydration set in and people were unable to wash their hands and feet. This made it very difficult to contain the disease. Had there been easily accessible water for the people of that region, the disease would not have been as wide spread and could have been contained quicker. Ebola is one of the most devastating examples of what can happen when clean water is unavailable.
What are the goals for the next 5 years for supporting school children, empowering women, and increasing water availability?
We have a set of goals that we’re calling RAIN 2020. We’ve learned many lessons from the work we’ve done so far and we are leveraging the lessons learned and best practices to tackle the next set of goals.
We’ve doubled our commitments and we’d like to expand the number of African countries that we are serving. Some of the best practices we’ve learned include incremental benefits that we hadn’t counted on. We call these programs, “high beneficiary programs.”
For example, when you build a dam in a region, the outcome is that there will be more beneficiaries than the ones in the original singular project. As we analyze this, we are determining which African countries we might provide with the greatest benefit.
We’ve also learned through several of our programs that we’ve been able to empower the most vulnerable members of society like women who’ve become farmers and youth who have become educated. Our goal is to reach half a million more by 2020.
How do you measure the benefits of the program and what is the committed budget?
There are several way in which we measure the benefits of the program and funding comes in various forms.
Our baseline is to count the number of beneficiaries reached and the total liters of water returned. Our driving factor is to make sure that we operate in a responsible and sustainable way and benefit the communities in which we do business. For instance, we can’t take out more water than we are putting back in to the community.
Partners play an important role in the success of RAIN. In phase one our goal was to bring in enough partners that for every $1 dollar we spent, there was a matching dollar from a partner. For phase two, our goal is to have enough partners that we are able to match $1.5 dollars for every $1 dollar Coca Cola contributes. The bigger goal is to go beyond current financials and together with our partners invest over $200 billion in Africa’s sanitation.
How can companies help support the RAIN effort and work alongside the already 140 partners?
We welcome the opportunity to talk with any company that is interested in discussing our work and how they might contribute by partnering with us. To date, our approach has received $45 million in co-investments from large stakeholders like governments, corporations, and civil society.
Much of the work we do is about helping governments build the capacity they need to take on these efforts, and leveraging our partners in the most effective ways. This helps us take on programs in countries that are considered high-impact.
Companies can learn more about what we do by going to our website at http://www.coca-colacompany.com/rain-the-replenish-africa-initiative and learn more about our partner Global Environment and Technology Foundation (GETF) who support our signature environmental stewardship initiatives at http://www.getf.org/our-projects-partnerships/the-coca-cola-company/ .
Bio:
Kelly Eisenhardt is Co-Founder and Managing Director at BlueCircle Advisors, an environmental compliance and sustainability consulting and training firm based in Massachusetts (www.bluecircleadvisors.com.) In her role at BlueCircle Advisors, she is responsible for providing business intelligence, strategy and implementation of environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk programs. Her experience aligns well with her client’s needs for technology, compliance, and sustainability expertise by helping companies create and manage their corporate environmental and social responsibility programs.
To contact Kelly Eisenhardt, send emails to kelly.eisenhardt@bluecircleadvisors.com or follow her on Twitter @KelEisenhardt. For more information about BlueCircle Advisors and the company’s products and services, please visit www.bluecircleadvisors.com, on Facebook at BlueCircle Advisors, on Twitter @OurBlueCircle, and on the LinkedIn group at the BlueCircle Advisors group.