Annual Reports
2023
“A LANDMARK YEAR”
2023 was a landmark year for Caminos de Agua, highlighted by the culmination of our largest project to date – Agua y Salud (“Water & Health”), which benefited over 5,000 people in three years. Our achievements were fueled by the generosity and dedication of institutional partners, grassroots collaborators, and individual donors like you. Working with core partners like INANA, CUVAPAS, SECOPA, and the San Cayetano Community Center, and supported by the Gonzalo Río Arronte Foundation, the Municipal Government of San Diego de la Unión, Amistad Canada, and “Clean Water for Life” – a volunteer-led initiative – we expanded clean water access through rainwater harvesting, sanitation, and filtration solutions. In 2023, we built 234 Rainwater Harvesting Systems across 22 rural villages, providing over 60 million liters of clean water.
2022
“THE NEXT TEN YEARS”
This was a landmark year for us at Caminos de Agua as we celebrated our 10th Anniversary of working on water issues. We are deeply grateful for the involvement and support of our growing community in making this critically-needed work a reality for so many at risk in our region and beyond. Our water crisis is complex, affecting hundreds of thousands of people regionally – and tens of millions of people all across Mexico – requiring the vast network of allies, water advocates, and other collaborators we’ve built to make a meaningful impact on our water reality.
2021
“MEETING THE CHALLENGE”
While the need for our work was greater than ever in 2021, so were the challenges. As we entered the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, rural communities in Guanajuato were hit harder than ever before. Reports of cases, along with hospitalizations and deaths, started rising dramatically in rural villages during the early weeks of 2021, forcing us to shut down all community work to limit exposure of our staff as well as the communities where we work. In early March, we regrouped and called a summit with our grassroots organizational partners, who represent dozens of rural communities, to figure out how to move forward. The response was unified and deafening, COVID or not, “communities need clean water – now more than ever.” So, we got back to work.
2020
“CONFRONTING CRISIS”
As COVID-19 began to ravage the world in early 2020, we braced ourselves here in Central Mexico, knowing the virus would impact the rural communities where we work much more acutely. Many of these communities only receive water for a few hours once or twice a week. For far too many, that means there is no consistent water access to meet the hygiene requirements necessary to control the spread of the virus. As a result, doing work in these communities immediately became riskier – requiring much more preparation, care, and expense.
2019
“REACHING FURTHER”
This was not a good year for water globally, and especially in our region – making our work more important than ever. The state of Guanajuato, in central México where we work, was named one of the most hydraulically stressed regions on the entire planet. Compounding the issue, we continue seeing increasing levels of contamination in regional water supplies with arsenic levels reaching as much as 22 times the World Health Organization recommendations. To effectively address this growing crisis, we’ve continued to build on and create new partnerships at all levels – working with community collaborations, NGOs, and local, state, and even federal government (pg. 9) to substantially increase our reach.
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This was quite a year for us. Water issues continued to grow more severe – not only locally, but globally as well. More than ever before, this year we realized that we need to be more strategic, efficient, and above all, leverage partners at all levels in order to help provide safe, healthy water access for those who most need it. So, this year we grew leaner and leveraged our expertise and experiences to generate a far greater impact than our own budget would allow.
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This has really been a year of incredible growth for the organization. Our team has gone from just 3-4 in early 2016 to 15 now at the end of 2017. We have 11 full- and part-time staff, eight dedicated board members, and we have welcomed nine long-term volunteers, interns, and fellowship recipients through our doors this year (who produced five master’s theses along the way to boot).
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This truly was a watershed year for the organization. With our new name and narrowed focus, our work had a greater impact on safe, healthy, and sustainable water supplies.
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In 2015 we were more effective than ever positively impacting lives in communities at risk surrounding San Miguel de Allende. Safe drinking water is now the norm in over 1,000 more homes and schools, thanks to our ceramic water filters.
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This was a key year for the Ceramic Water Filters. We finalized our mixes, began in-house water quality testing, started distribution in local communities, began selling in other local markets, started a filter sponsorship program, trained outreach workers for wider distribution, received incredibly positive feedback from users, and quantitatively measured extreme improvements in drinking water quality at household levels.
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Caminos de Agua is a nonprofit organization that creates access to clean drinking water through a unique, proven participatory and grassroots approach. Our projects currently provide clean water access to more than 50,000 people in the Upper Río Laja Watershed as well as throughout Mexico. Our goal is to reach 250,000 by 2030. Support our work by making a donation today.