Splash is at the forefront of a growing movement to ensure that children in urban poverty have the resources they need to thrive and realise their full potential. They design water, sanitation, hygiene (WASH), and menstrual health solutions alongside governments within some of the world’s biggest, low resource cities. Their coverage is city-wide, with an approach of targeting 100% of public schools with their WASH solutions.

Splash’s approach is uniquely targeted towards the urban poor and its solutions are designed and built to last in dense and highly-populated environments. Splash are committed to building strong local organisations that work directly with institutions and governments to ensure their sustainable ownership and funding for long-term provision of WASH services.

In their current initiative, Project WISE, Splash’s goal is to reach every school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Kolkata, India, with their WASH services. The program focus is to benefit one million children by 2023 through positive changes in infrastructure, behaviour change programs, and strengthened menstrual health services. Since 2007, Splash has undertaken 2,148 projects in schools and public institutions across eight countries, reaching 794,570 people, of whom 611,014 are children.

While completion of the work in the two target cities is the short-term goal, Splash’s longer-range ambition is to establish clear roadmaps for success for cities beyond Addis Ababa and Kolkata. Proving a cost-efficient and durable program of this size, being co-funded and co-implemented with government and locally overseen, with clear health impacts is unprecedented. Splash looks to work with governments and INGOs to design and advise on similarly sized WASH projects post Project WISE. Successfully implementing this project in two disparate contexts in South Asia and East Africa will provide clear evidence and learnings for replication in similarly sized, low-resource cities.