Water for the Poor

Paul Faeth of Global Water Challenge (GWC) has written an excellent overview [doc] of how to bring water to the world's poor:

There are essentially four principal factors that determine access of people to safe drinking water and sanitation: 1) population growth, 2) funding, 3) cost per person, and 4) life of infrastructure, or stated another way, sustainability of investments.

For this discussion, population growth is not with the realm of influence of the water and sanitation community. The remaining three factors suggest strategies to enhance global access...

Faeth advocates the typical solutions to these problems (cheaper financing, deduce corruption, etc.), but -- more importantly -- his organization is putting money towards projects that promise change.

Tomorrow, I will post GWC's list of candidate and funded projects. I am hoping that you readers can tell him (and everyone else) what you like and dislike about those projects (in the comments). Your advice will help GWC decide how to allocate its scarcest resource -- money.

I will also post a poll that will let you vote on the projects you like.

[Those of you with memories that last longer than a fish will recall that I asked your opinions on 24 questions derived from IBM's Global Innovation Outlook on water. Here's the original post, which links to the 24 posts on each question. Take a look at the comments and add more!]