This year, the theme of World Water Day, celebrated every year on 22 March, is "Accelerating Change", emphasising the importance of national and international cooperation for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6.

Therefore, today’s message from the Wilo-Foundation comes at just the right time: we are pleased to announce the launch of a new funding project with the young non-profit organisation Young Water Solutions (YWS) based in Brussels. The organisation works to empower young people to develop effective solutions in the WASH sector (water, sanitation, hygiene) as part of a bigger community, and to create their own start-ups.

In 2017 the “Young Water Fellowship” programme was launched to provide advice and technical and financial resources to help you people validate and establish their social businesses. So far, the organisation YWS, which was founded in 2015, has supported 100 start-ups in the area of water and wastewater, helping them to test and realise their projects and social businesses, including in South America (Nicaragua) and Africa (Senegal, Uganda).

This year, the programme will take place in South Africa for the first time. From April onwards, ambitious water pioneers will have an opportunity to take part in an 8-month programme where they will develop ideas for projects tackling concrete problems in South Africa’s WASH sector. There will be online hackathons, a three-day boot camp and various coaching offers, enabling participants to develop sustainable solutions in the WASH sector and lay the foundations for their own business models. This year, the programme is being supported by the Wilo-Foundation for the first time. Evi Hoch, member of the executive board of the Wilo-Foundation, is impressed with the approach of Young Water Solutions, saying that it “provides excellent conditions for implementing long-term and decentralised solutions to problems in the WASH sector. Enabling young people to develop their own ideas from scratch, in a professional environment, is perfectly in line with the motto of our funding activities, namely: Empowering young people.” Further key funding partners of the South Africa programme are the well-known German non-profit organisation Viva con Agua, which is based in Hamburg and also has an office in South Africa, and Aquafin, a Belgium company.

About 60 participants will participate in the programme, who will be asked to develop and submit their project ideas by October 2023. The best five projects will be tested in real life as prototypes and developed further in collaboration with different partners.