ACR - China

A Child’s Right (ACR) is unique in the water field as our sole focus is bringing clean, purified drinking water to vulnerable children in impoverished urban and peri-urban centers – specifically to sites burdened with unsafe water quality and high concentrations of at-risk children. In the last two years alone, we have provided safe drinking water to more than 150,000 children in orphanages, street shelters, rescue homes, schools, displacement camps and children’s hospitals in cities around the world. In 2009, our goal is to assist 100,000 more.

Our funding comes solely from philanthropic sources and our dedicated teams of domestic and international staff have decades of combined first-hand experience in clean water technologies and charitable aid projects. In addition to our work in Ethiopia, Nepal, Thailand and Cambodia, ACR’s most ambitious project to date is our five-year progressive mission to bring clean drinking water to every institutionalized orphan in China – an undertaking that will encompass more than 500 orphanages in total. We launched this project in partnership with the Chinese government in May 2008, and within our first year we have already completed more than 150 system installations in orphanages throughout the country.

ACR’s purification equipment is custom made in the US to achieve consistent top-quality water purification standards through continuous removal of >99.99999% of all bacteria, >99.999% of all viruses and >99.95% of all parasitic cysts from contaminated water sources, while achieving >95% water recovery. We maintain equally high build quality standards which dictate that our equipment is able to operate consistently with limited electricity and fluctuating pressure and water sources, while at the same time requiring little maintenance in often disparate environments. All equipment is NSF certified and purchased at manufacturer cost pricing, enabling ACR to bring safe, reliable and standardized top-tier equipment to every project at a fraction of the cost that a US-based consumer would purchase similar technologies.

ACR distributes all equipment and oversees all water station construction, water system installations, scheduled maintenance and review, resupplies of spare parts and provisions, and periodic water quality tests through our US and international offices and staff. All installations are monitored routinely for efficacy and safety, and each system assists between 100 - 5,000 children (depending on the site). The process and system coverage are scalable and have been used in both Cambodia and Nepal’s largest pediatric hospitals to assist more than 100,000 children per site annually.

ACR was established in 2006 by founder and executive director, Eric Stowe, and is headquartered in Tacoma, Washington.

Live Earth will partner with A Child's Right for our events in mainland China and Hong Kong. Our projects will focus on provisions of clean water for impoverished orphanages as well as schools for migrant children in China.