NiJeL is proud to announce our new partnership with Water.org! Over the coming months, we’ll be building the WaterCredit.org Map – an interactive, web-based map that will, among other things, showcase Water.org’s WaterCredit Partner Organizations (POs) and projects.
Across the globe, over one billion people do not have access to safe, clean drinking water and over 2.5 billon have no access to rudimentary sanitation. Much of the problem lies in the relatively large capital costs associated with building or connecting reliable water and sanitation infrastructure to the homes of poor families. Water and sanitation can often be differentially expensive for poor people – several studies suggest that poor households can pay up to 20 times more for water than their wealthier counterparts. Add to that the increased costs associated with poor heath and the opportunity costs associated with walking long distances for water, and it becomes clear that a small micro-loan to help a household connect to clean water and sanitation infrastructure will put dramatic downward pressure on these costs and be a clear economic winner in the long run.
Water.org aims to create access to microfinance for water and sanitation infrastructure projects through its WaterCredit Initiative, which provides financing for their POs to run demonstration water and sanitation microfinance projects. The ultimate goal is to prove to traditional banking institutions that these loans are not excessively risky (i.e. repayment rates are very high), and indeed, they can be profitable as well as environmentally and socially beneficial to the entire community. To that end, it is critically important to showcase the positive impacts of the WaterCredit Initiative on families and communities, and to demonstrate the willingness and ability of these households to repay their loans in a timely fashion at reasonable interest rates.
Working toward the goal of building a simple, visual, participatory tool showing project impacts and healthy repayment histories, NiJeL will build the first two phases of the WaterCredit.org “See It” Map. Phase 1 will focus on building the database, mapping and dashboard infrastructure, while Phase 2 will create better tools to gather and share detailed information about each PO and WaterCredit project. In Phase 1, NiJeL will build the foundational WaterCredit.org “See It” Map, a web-based, interactive map featuring three main views – a global view, a country view, and a partner view – each showing spatial data layers specific to that view. The global view will show data layers relevant to water and sanitation microfinance, such as global poverty, general microfinance data, and data on access and quality of water and sanitation infrastructure. In addition to the data shown on the global view, the country view will show the locations of the WaterCredit Initiative’s POs, the individual WaterCredit projects facilitated by the POs, and local financial institutions supporting the WaterCredit Initiative. Finally, the partner view will show more detailed information about each PO along with an access point to a fully featured partner view. This second, more detailed partner view, part of NiJeL’s Phase 2 work, will include a site map of the PO’s project area along with specific information about each project associated with that PO.
In conjunction with the Phase 1 portion of this mapping project, NiJeL will also create Water.org’s centralized PostgreSQL database where data for the WaterCredit.org “See It” Map and many other applications, including the Projects-Parners-Funds (PPF) Dashboard, will emanate from. NiJeL will also work to create the PPF Dashboard, a comprehensive, customizable, and searchable intranet data portal that will allow Water.org staff access to all critical organizational and project data.
We’re very excited about this work with Water.org, so stay tuned to the NiJeL blog for updates as we move forward on this project.
