In India, implementation of the Foundation’s water projects is secured by our strategic partner, Sunlit Future. Sunlit Future is essentially a technology provider that specialises in building solar solutions. They are based in Auroville, an international township in the Villipuram district of Tamil Nadu in Southeast India. Long-term community engagement (sanitation and hygiene training, community mobilisation and development) is secured by local development NGOs who know the local population very well and stay for a long time in the areas.
In 2023, we have initiated phase VII of the 100-100 project. Originally, the aim was 100 villages, but the partnership has proven successful and in 2022 we had reached 500 villages.
Explore the story maps below to learn more about the beneficiaries in two states:
All Foundation-funded projects in India are being tracked in a joint online dashboard.
From 2019-2021, focus was on improving the collaboration model before reaching out to new villages:
- In the first half of 2019, 101 villages were revisited to repair and upgrade the systems and retrain the communities. Based on this work we will make clearer standards for the division of responsibilities between the different partners
- From June 2019, 89 new water projects were added in the states of Odisha (75 villages), Maharashtra (10) and Spiti Valley in Himalaya (4)
From 2015 – 2018, we provided access to safe drinking water for 34,000 inhabitants in 101 rural tribal underprivileged villages in the states of Odisha (65 villages) Madhya Pradesh (9 villages) and Maharashtra (26 villages) and in the Spiti Valley in the Himalaya (1 village). We collaborated with our strategic partner, Sunlit Future and several local NGO’s working in those areas: The Foundation and Sunlit Future delivered the solar driven pump setup, while the local NGO was responsible for ensuring piping, tap stands and sanitation with funding from other sources.
Programme manager Nils Thorup visited the village Kotagarh block in Odisha in February 2018 to inspect the installations
Co-funding is a given
Projects in India are only partly funded by the Poul Due Jensen Foundation. Sunlit Future and their NGO partners also cooperateswith Tata Trusts (a large industrial foundation in India) and the Indian authorities, who almost by default finance the sanitation installations under a Government program in the villages where we bring in access to water.
- In the first years, approximately 3.6M DKK were been granted toward phases 1 and 2
- In 2018, the Foundation committed 6.6m DKK toward phase 3
- In 2021, 5.5 million DKK were committed toward phase 4
