Cummins Expands Effort to Provide Sustainable Water to Communities In-Need
Global power technology leader Cummins Inc. is expanding its partnership with Water.org, providing over $500,000 in grants to communities in Peru and the Philippines to help residents acquire much needed water infrastructure.
The project is part of Cummins Water Works, the company initiative to address the global water crisis by partnering with leading water experts to invest and engage in large-scale, high-impact water projects around the world.
Under PLANET 2050, Cummins environmental sustainability strategy, the company has established the goal to produce net water benefits that exceed Cummins’ annual water consumption in all regions where the company has a presence.
When Cummins Water Works was founded, the company immediately partnered with Water.org, the global non-profit organization that works to bring safe, accessible and cost-effective water and sanitation solutions to the communities that need them most.
The partnership has already resulted in providing access to sustainable water to over 400,000 people in Brazil, India and Mexico.
“The statistics surrounding the severity of the water crisis in the world are unbelievable,” says Scott Saum, Program Manager for Cummins Water Works. “We recently organized a panel discussion with Cummins leadership, Water.org and The Nature Conservancy, another of our key water partner experts, and learned some staggering evidence about water security. The discussion provided valuable insight to our employees of the situation at hand, and it is rewarding to know that our collaboration is making a difference.”
Experts estimate about 785 million people in the world today lack access to safe water. About 2 billion people lack access to a toilet. Financially, the cost of not having access to clean water and sanitation is about $260 billion per year.
Families spend millions of hours collecting water, impacting school dropout rates in addition to hygiene-related diseases.
Today in the Philippines, 57 million people, out of an overall population of 110 million, lack access to reliable, safely managed drinking water, and 43 million people lack access to safely managed sanitation services. Similarly, with Peru’s population of 32 million, 16 million lack access to safely managed drinking water, while 15 million lack access to safely managed sanitation services.
The grants from the Cummins Foundation will help communities by providing affordable financing to obtain infrastructure including plumbing, pumps, taps, toilets and water storage tanks.
