Gap Inc. Collaborates to Ease India’s Water Crisis
The Women + Water Collaborative was launched by the Water Resilience Coalition and is composed of companies across different sectors.
Gap Inc. has joined a new initiative called the Women + Water Collaborative to improve access to clean water and sanitation in India.
The collaborative was launched by the Water Resilience Coalition, or WRC, which gathers chief executive officers around the world to address the global water crisis. WRC has set a goal to contribute water security across 100 priority basins for 3 billion people, and enable equitable access to water, sanitation and hygiene for more than 300 million people, by 2030.
Along with Gap Inc. and the WRC, other participants in Women + Water are Cargill, the large U.S. food corporation; GSK, a British multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, and WaterAid, an international non-governmental organization focused on water, sanitation and hygiene
Women + Water will help relieve waterstressed communities in India, beginning with the Krishna and Godavari basins.
“The Women + Water Collaborative builds on Gap Inc.'s history of designing innovative programs with nonprofits and the public sector, then convening corporate partners to drive sustainability at scale,” said Dan Fibiger, head of global sustainability for Gap Inc., in a statement Tuesday. “By joining across food, fashion and biopharma, we can drive meaningful impact in communities that fuel our global supply chains.”
The collaborative builds on the success of the previous Gap partnership with
U.S. Aid for International Development called the Women + Water Alliance, which empowered 2.4 million people to improve their access to water and sanitation in India between 2017 and 2023. The USAID/Gap Inc. alliance is one of 21 collective action projects in 15 basins underway across Asia, Africa, South America and North America as part of the WRC's 2030 goals.
The Women + Water initiative marks the first time that companies from different sectors spanning apparel, biopharma and agriculture have united with shared goals and governance to provide access to clean water and sanitation in the same communities.
“The Women + Water Collaborative will improve the availability and quality of water in priority river basins through water replenishment and conservation using methods such as rainwater harvesting,” the collaborative stated. “It will provide communities with safe drinking water and climate-resilient sanitation and hygiene infrastructure and services. Although women in rural India play a crucial role in water collection and use, their participation in decision-making around water resources remains low. This program will leverage women's leadership to build water resilience, improve water security, and enable equitable access to water and sanitation for communities at scale.”
Sanda Ojiambo, CEO and executive director of the United Nations Global Compact and co-chair of the WRC, said in a statement, “The companies involved in this initiative have joined an alliance that thrives on collaboration and collective action. This cooperation will play a key role in achieving the WRC's ambitious goals outlined in its 2030 strategy.”
The WRC is an initiative of the CEO Water Mandate, a partnership between the U.N. Global Compact and the Pacific Institute.
“Water is essential for human health, as well as for the ongoing production of our medicines and vaccines,” said Claire Lund, vice president of sustainability at GSK, in her statement. “Yet climate change and nature loss are impacting water and health in locally specific ways — with some countries being more vulnerable. That's why we are focused on water as part of our commitment to contributing to a nature positive world.”
“We know that reliable access to clean water and sanitation is essential for people and agriculture,” said Michelle Grogg, Cargill's vice president of corporate responsibility. “At Cargill, we are focused on improving access to safe drinking water and sanitation, with the goal of reaching 500,000 people in priority communities by 2030. Partnership and collective action are a critical pathway to help us deliver on this ambition.”
WaterAid will launch the program in five Indian states and six priority districts, and indicated that it is “keen to bring on additional corporate partners to expand the reach.”
“Our impact is limited only by the number of corporate partners we are able to bring on,” said Kelly Parsons,
CEO of WaterAid America. “None of the sustainable development goals will be achieved without global collaboration and partnership.”