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About the Akvo Foundation

What does the word ‘Akvo’ mean?

Akvo means ‘water’ in the Esperanto language.

When was Akvo founded and by whom?

The Akvo Foundation was formally incorporated in September 2008, but work started on Akvo in autumn 2006. Akvo was founded by the Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP) and several key individuals. People who played a key role at the start were Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson, Jeroen van der Sommen (Director of NWP), Peter van der Linde, Gino Lee, Mark Charmer, Gabriel von Heijne, Mark Nitzberg, Caroline Figuères, and Paul van Koppen.

Does Akvo have ANBI status? Are my donations tax deductable?

Akvo Foundation is a non-profit foundation with Dutch ANBI status. This means, among other things, that in the Netherlands donors to Akvo can deduct their gifts from income or corporation tax. Akvo is not registered as a non-profit in the United States (501c3 status ). However, many of our partners are.

What is Akvo trying to accomplish?

Akvo seeks to accelerate the implementation process and improve the quality of development aid projects. We do this by providing internet tools that make it easier for people to do their work and share their results. Our tools include a knowledge bank called Akvopedia; a market of projects needing funds called the Akvo Marketplace; and a feedback and reporting system called Really Simple Reporting (RSR).

Who funds Akvo?

Akvo received initial funds for startup from a number of different partners: NWP, Partners voor Water, Nedap, Aqua4all, ASN Bank, Simavi, Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the Schoklandfonds, Rabobank, Unie van Waterschappen. We have also received in-kind contributions from IRC, ProWeb and SIWI. In November 2010, as part of its MFSII funding announcement, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that around €100 million worth of development aid projects will be reported via Akvo system over a five year period. The operational revenues related to this service agreement mean that Akvo is now financially self-sustaining, a key objective of our business plan.

Who works at Akvo?

The Akvo team and its volunteers are as diverse as the people we serve, spanning at least one ocean, a couple of continents, and several countries.

Who are Akvo’s partners?

Akvo works with hundreds of different organisations, from NGOs to commercial enterprises, knowledge institutions to funding partners.

Who owns Akvo?

Akvo is a non-profit foundation, and as such is owned by no one. It is, however, accountable to a Board drawn from ITC, development organisations and banks. The tools we produce are released under an open source license.

Can I trust Akvo?

Trust is very important to Akvo. We are careful about who we put ours in, and view the trust that others put in us as a serious responsibility. We are carefully building out our "trusted partner network" using a thorough vetting process, adding new Support partners who already have a track record in development aid work (see the Akvo partner rules). As Support partners bring Field partners they currently work with into the system, our total network can expand and reach farther.

We are as open as possible about what we do, in both the creation of our tools and the financing that supports it. Our accounts are audited every year by independent public accountants, and the reports are published on our website.

What is the business model of Akvo?

We charge a service fee to our partners who use Akvo RSR and related tools such as the Akvo Marketplace; access to the Akvopedia is free of charge. We also provide consultancy services and work with companies' Corporate Social Responsibility programmes.

Is Akvo a commercial company?

No, we're a non-profit foundation. Our goal is to be financially independent, offering a stable platform for users of our services.

Why does Akvo focus on relatively small projects?

Most people who lack access to water, sanitation, healthcare and education live in rural areas (WHO/Unicef study). In such areas centralized systems are often not an option because of the distances involved. That is why large numbers of distributed systems are needed.

Small-scale family or village-level systems which can be managed by the local community show great potential for filling this need. Such systems can be adapted to local circumstances, a task often undertaken by local NGOs who have an intimate knowledge of the situation and the local needs. Studies show that small projects also tend to be the most cost-effective.

Such projects also offer the opportunity to create a direct link from the people in the field carrying out the project back to the people funding the project.

Why do the majority of your projects focus on water and sanitation?

Akvo was conceived in late 2006 to share knowledge about water and sanitation project best practice. Investments in water and sanitation are a highly effective means of alleviating poverty.

"No other single intervention is more likely to have a significant impact on global poverty than the provision of safe water."

- C.J. Schuster-Wallace et al, United Nations University, "Safe water as the key to global health"

"...all water and sanitation improvements are cost-beneficial in all developing world sub-regions. In developing regions, the return on a US$1 investment was in the range of US$5 to US$46, depending on the intervention."

- Hutton, G., Haller, L., and Bartram, J., WHO 2007, "Global cost-benefit analysis of water supply and sanitation interventions"

In late 2010, we were happy to fulfill partner requests that we extend the system to support projects with other focus areas such as health, education and economic development.

Why do you focus on simple and affordable technology?

The failure of many past projects in areas such as water and sanitation have been caused at least in part by the use of either technology that was too complex for the community to manage or so-called "appropriate technology" of low quality, and neither was properly adapted to the community. You have to get it just right. A recent study ("Where every drop counts: tackling Africa's water crisis", J. Skinner, IIDE, March 2009) shows what happens when the context in which you are embedding the technology is not taken into account from the start: in sub-Saharan Africa, a quarter of a billion dollars were wasted on non-sustainable water points.

We believe part of the solution lies in low-cost, affordable and reparable technology, produced and maintained by local skills with local materials. The technology thus becomes part of a sustainable supply chain and is embedded in the community. Looking at the effect of large-scale dissemination of small-scale solutions in the case of irrigation, ("Ending poverty with water control and market access",Urs Heierli, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC, 2007), one can see the enormous potential.