By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

Clean, accessible water for the world’s poor is one of the hottest causes of the season.

December donors who open their hearts and wallets will send millions of dollars flowing to villages and urban slums in Africa, South Asia and Central America. And, drop by drop, lives are changed. Countless children are spared killer waterborne diseases. Countless women are spared backbreaking hours fetching water in 40-pound, 5-gallon plastic jugs. There are dozens of water-focused charities touted on websites, in Christmas-themed catalogs and at social events such as a sold-out, celebrity-packed Manhattan charity ball last week.

They’ve honed the message — water is critical to health and social and economic development for nearly 900 million people — in a way that it can compete for urgent attention with hunger, malaria, HIV/AIDS and refugee aid. The bottled water donation cause has ridden three major currents in the past decade: a boom in ordinary churchgoers taking short mission trips to the Third World to see needs firsthand; the explosion of social media multiplying vivid images of the needs; and a raft of celebrities attaching their names and energies to it.

“Access to water will be one of the most critical challenges of our time,” actor Matt Damon says in a statement to USA TODAY. “There are a lot of ways to tackle it, but for me, ensuring that every human being has access to safe drinking water and the dignity of a toilet … is one of the most urgent and pressing causes in the world today.” Damon founded a water charity, then linked up with one established by engineer Gary White to form Water.org with a transformative goal.

White says, “It’s not just about drilling a gazillion wells, it’s about tapping into the inherent power of people at the bottom. We have to help them find their own voice and leverage their power as customers and citizens.”

Important time of year

December is critical to charity fund-raising goals. Several charities report that this month accounts for 20% to 30% of their annual income from individual donors. Without such signs of widespread interest, the major foundations won’t send the big money. To get donors’ attention, water charities promise even the humblest purchase — a $10 water bottle hawked by Damon, a $25 bag of cement from Christian band Jars of Clay’s Blood:Water Mission or a $100 share in the cost of a deep well offered by World Vision, a leading evangelical charity — will transform lives.

The most sophisticated charities offer financial transparency and high-tech proofs that let donors track their gifts and even look at the wells they funded on satellite mapping from the techno-savvy charity called simply charity: water. The whole process starts in the villages when the people who need the water show proof of their commitment. The top groups all require beneficiaries to buy in with some of their own meager dollars. Only then will the charity commit $12,000 to $25,000 to a project, about $15 to $25 per person, for a well. Then, a hydro-geologist hunts for water sources, determines where to dig and how deep. Most rural villages don’t have electricity, so the well can’t be deeper than 300 feet if villagers are going to use a hand pump to bring it to the surface.

World Vision

World Vision drills a new borehole at Kandine village in Zinder, Niger. Next come the drilling rigs, usually staffed or contracted by a local non-governmental organization (NGO), the foot soldiers of Third World development work.

Costs are higher in land-locked countries such as the Central African Republic, where Jim Hocking, founder of Integrated Community Development International, says his highest cost for well digging is fuel. The ICDI just spent $1.5 million drilling 60 wells and rehabilitating an additional 150 wells there to serve the Ba’Aka pygmies.

Once the dig hits water, a pump is installed — the $600 Afrodev is a low-maintenance favorite — and water quality is tested for 24 hours before technical success is declared. The average life expectancy of a well that should last decades is only 11 months, usually because a pump breaks down. So charities build maintenance training into their cost structure, since a paycheck for a pump mechanic is not a sexy Christmas catalog item.

Also mandatory: training in simple hygiene such as washing hands and cleaning water containers, White says.

White, who worked for Catholic Relief Services before launching Water Partners in 1990, is like most charity founders: He waxes poetic about the power of water “spiritually, socially, medically, and as the building block of every economy since the Roman aqueducts.”

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