Clean water for one million kids

Dear friends of Splash:

We're excited to tell you about something new, so we're focusing this update on our work in Ethiopia.

The Splash Ethiopia team has been hard at work in Addis Ababa, and we have reached 250 school sites out of a total of 372 — putting our goals well within sight.

At the same time, we have nearly completed three model sites in a new city — Bahir Dar — and plan to launch a citywide coverage effort in the next few months. Bahir Dar is one of the largest cities and top tourist destinations in Ethiopia. Situated on the scenic Lake Tana, Bahir Dar and the surrounding area is known for medieval monasteries and the Blue Nile Falls.

What is lesser known is that the school WASH conditions need improvement, and Splash is there to help! In a recent citywide survey, we found that water quality and shortages are serious problems, school latrines are poorly constructed and maintained, and soap and water are hard to come by at handwashing facilities. Some school sites outside of the city but within the jurisdiction of the Bahir Dar education department lack electricity and any access to water at all.

We know that Bahir Dar will be an opportunity for learning, and we hope it is the next step in our pathway to improving urban school WASH nationally. As with Addis Ababa, our goal is for kids to have access to safe water, hands washed with soap, hygienic toilets, and menstrual health support.

Stay tuned for more news in the coming months.

Splashily yours,
-Team Splash

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I certainly couldn’t have predicted that as of the end of 2021, we would still be in perpetual lockdown and dealing with widespread disruptions everywhere we look. Over the last year, we’ve seen the combined impact of a global public health crisis, natural disasters, political tumult, rampant cost inflations, and worldwide supply chain issues that hit our programs and work extremely hard.

More than 50% of our global staff have had COVID-19 since its onset, despite the intense restrictions we’ve put in place (all have fully recovered, thankfully). Both the Seattle and Kolkata teams barely stepped foot in an office in 2021. Schools remained shut nearly the entire year in Kolkata; in Addis Ababa, our staff had to juggle their work with constantly evolving schools shifts and schedules. Transportation, importation, and the general cost of all goods have gone up exponentially. Despite that all, we reached our anticipated targets for the year while also making great strides forward across multiple areas.

We advanced the technology that helps to run our organization and make critical decisions about our impact. We saw quantum leaps forward in our menstrual health and behavior change programs. Our teams on the ground doing the hard work of major projects are now capable of doing five times more in 2021 than they were even two or three years ago. We’ve been able to routinize extensive infrastructure work in a way that previously we could only dream of. Our engagement with our government partners continues to be a major learning curve, and we are incredibly proud of the relationships we have cultivated. The schools continue to increase their populations at a staggering rate, and we continue to keep pace. We’ve started advising other organizations and new government partners how to deploy parts of our model on their own.

While 2021 has been one of our hardest years since starting the organization, it has also been one of our strongest, and I am deeply impressed by and thankful for our team members and their unyielding ingenuity.

— Eric Stowe, CEO & founder

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