Q&A with Sarina Prabasi: Advancing the Sustainable Development Goals through Partnerships
By Alice Korngold and Sarina Prabasi
Businesses have a vested interest in breaking the barriers that prevent millions of women and girls from achieving their full potential. One of the greatest challenges facing girls is basic access to clean water and toilets. WaterAid’s powerful new campaign, Girl Strong, provides a way for businesses and foundations to join in driving real, transformative change. In this Q&A, Water Aid chief executive Sarina Prabasi discusses ways in which companies can engage with Girl Strong to help girls improve their lives, while advancing numerous SDGs, and driving economic development.
Q: In which countries are you focusing your attention? And what challenges face girls in achieving better futures?
A: From Nicaragua to Nepal, Mozambique to India, WaterAid is taking aim at one of the world’s most critical, yet solvable problems: the lack of access to clean water, toilets and hygiene. In 37 countries around the globe, we are enabling people to access a fundamental right, and foundation to better life outcomes. We know that water and toilets underpin so many other underlying issues, especially for women and girls: health, education, and livelihoods, to name just a few.
There are 663 million people in the world today who don’t have access to water that is safe to drink. At the same time, 2.4 billion people—one in three people globally—do not have access to a safe, private toilet. Many of us take these life basics for granted, forgetting that clean water, toilets and hygiene are essential to healthy, dignified and prosperous lives.
The global water and sanitation crisis is lived out in communities around the world each and every day. But it’s women and girls who carry the brunt of the burden. Women and girls spend 40 billion hours a year collecting water for their families from water sources that are often remote and unsafe to drink, and 96 billion hours a year looking for a private place to urinate or defecate. That’s millions of lives and billions of hours that could have been spent studying, running businesses, or earning an income.
When toilets are nowhere to be found, millions of women and girls face harassment, assault and even rape while out looking for a private place to answer nature’s call. And when they’re on their periods? Girls often stay home from school or drop out altogether, simply because they do not have the sanitation and water facilities needed to manage their menstruation in privacy and dignity. The missed opportunities in education have a ripple effect across all aspects of their personal and professional futures.
Q: What is innovative and compelling about the approach Girl Strong is taking to increase the likelihood of girls preparing for successful lives?
A: Girl Strong isn’t just a story about protecting women’s and girls’ rights to water, sanitation and hygiene—it’s a call to action for all of us. Girl Strong offers a glimpse into the problems that many women and girls face day in and day out: the time lost to collecting water; the fear of looking for a safe place to go to the bathroom; and the struggle to maintain personal hygiene and prevent the spread of disease. But Girl Strong goes beyond the problems alone.
This is a campaign that also promotes solutions, helping women and girls unlock their potential through universal access to water, toilets and hygiene services. It puts girls’ faces on a topic that feels very distant to most Americans. It celebrates progress and opportunity—the things girls can accomplish when nothing stands in their way. And it offers ways for people across the US to stand up for the strength of girls everywhere.
When we achieve this goal of a world where all women and girls have access to water and toilets, girls will have more time available to attend school, survival rates among newborns in developing countries will increase by 44 percent (as a result of healthcare workers and moms being able to wash their hands), and an estimated return of $220 billion will be contributed to the global economy annually from increased productivity and reduced health care costs related to unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation and inadequate hygiene practices.
Q: To what extent does the success of girls have an impact on economic development in communities and countries where you are working?
A: Empowering women is impossible without water and sanitation. Girls around the world today spend 152 million hours every day collecting water for their families. That’s millions of hours that could instead be spent getting an education, caring for their families, working or running a business. When we succeed in achieving a world where girls have more time available to attend school—and are able to complete their studies rather than dropping out or falling behind when they begin menstruating—girls will also be more likely to marry and have children later, further boosting their chances to live healthier, more productive and more prosperous lives.
Currently, the global economy loses $260 billion each year from reduced productivity and health care costs associated with illness due to unsafe water, poor sanitation and inadequate hygiene practices. That’s as much a huge loss of potential as it is an opportunity—for all of us. At WaterAid, we are passionately committed to female empowerment wherever we work, because we know that when women can fulfill their true potential, the whole community is transformed.
Q: Which of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals does Girl Strong help to advance, and how?
A: Here’s the thing about water, sanitation and hygiene: it’s connected to everything! Obviously, Global Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) is near and dear to our hearts here at WaterAid, and is at the fundamental core of everything we do, including the Girl Strong campaign.
But Girl Strong also helps advance No Poverty (Goal 1), Good Health and Well-Being (Goal 3), Quality Education (Goal 4), Gender Equality (Goal 5), Decent Work and Economic Growth (Goal 8) and Reduced Inequalities (Goal 10).
The campaign does this by promoting solutions that help women and girls overcome water, sanitation and hygiene-related obstacles to achieve their full potential. Access to clean water and toilets brings real social and economic transformation to entire communities, allowing women and girls to live the healthy, empowered lives they envision and deserve.
Q: Is Girl Strong an initiative that might interest multinational corporations?
A: All companies can play a role in breaking the barriers that prevent millions of women and girls from living up to their full potential. Since the Global Goals were introduced in 2015, business leaders around the world have stepped up to help drive sustainable change within their own companies and beyond. And yet, many businesses are still looking for tangible vehicles that will help bring those ambitions to fruition and make a real difference in the world.
That’s where Girl Strong offers real opportunity. Like WaterAid, many multinational companies are profoundly committed to gender equality and want to empower women both within their own ranks, and around the world. WaterAid’s partnerships with companies such as Aveda, H&M, HSBC, Unilever, and The Body Shop have delivered water and sanitation projects that enable women and girls to get an education, earn a living and take a more active role in their communities.
Girl Strong provides a way for corporations to migrate from corporate social responsibility to corporate social opportunity. Through this campaign and alignment with WaterAid’s work to empower women and girls globally with access to clean water and toilets, businesses can demonstrate responsibility and leadership, pursue opportunity and innovation and inspire other businesses to get onboard.
The best strategic partnerships are based on shared values, and both gender equality and reduced inequality are issues that are critical to every business. At WaterAid, we believe that women have the right to play a full role in society. And like many companies, we are a brand that people trust to live our values, and make positive change happen. Together, Girl Strong gives us the opportunity to empower millions of women and girls by improving safe water and sanitation in some of the world’s poorest communities—remembering that a sustainable business community ultimately depends upon a sustainable society.
Q: How can global companies and their foundations be useful in helping to advance Girl Strong?
A: The Girl Strong campaign offers a powerful platform through which to take aim at how girls are disproportionately prevented from leading healthy, productive and fulfilling lives due to the lack of clean water, toilets and hygiene. It’s a campaign that global companies and their foundations can easily get behind because it is so closely aligned with what we all know: when women and girls are empowered, we all win.
We invite companies and their foundations to help advance this work by partnering with us on funding, employee engagement and consumer-facing marketing. We would love to work together to customize a strategy that advances both the end goals of Girl Strong, and their business goals. Girl Strong is an ideal platform for crafting a partnership that tells the company’s story, while also building the company’s reputation as a brand that empowers women. Together, we can work with your employees, customers and senior leadership, engaging everyone in being part of the solution.
About the guest:
Sarina Prabasi
Chief Executive
WaterAid
Sarina Prabasi is Chief Executive of WaterAid America, the #1 ranked international nonprofit helping people in the world’s poorest communities gain access to clean water, toilets and hygiene. A tribute to her vision and leadership, Sarina has been named by both Fortune and Food & Wine magazines as one of the “Most Innovative Women in Food & Drink,” and honored by the New York Business Journal as a 2016 “Woman of Influence.”
About the author:
Alice Korngold
Author
A Better World, Inc.: How Companies Profit by Solving Global Problems…Where Governments Cannot
Alice Korngold is co-editor of Giving Thoughts and the author of A Better World, Inc.: How Companies Profit by Solving Global Problems…Where Governments Cannot (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Leveraging Good Will: Strengthening Nonprofits by Engaging Businesses (Jossey Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 2005). For over 20 years, she has been training and placing business executives on NGO/nonprofit boards and consulting to corporations, foundations, and NGOs/nonprofits on board governance, CSR, and sustainability. Twitter: @alicekorngold.
