New Video from Clinton Global Initiative, Responding to Haiti Cholera Crisis, and Partnership with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

This year’s Clinton Global Initiative was our biggest ever when Bob McDonald, P&G CEO and Chairman, announced with President Clinton our goal to scale-up the Children’s Safe Drinking Water (CSDW) Program to save one life every hour.  The announcement was widely covered and generated over 100 million media impressions.  Many of our safe drinking water partners attended an event in New York City to help us make this new commitment.  I’d encourage you to watch this short video in order to hear and see the excitement behind our new commitment (VIDEO).

Our work with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) continues following the September meeting and the most recent collaboration is to address the cholera crisis in Haiti.  I was contacted by members of CGI and the US State Department about providing PUR to help prevent deaths in Haiti.  PUR is very effective in killing the bacteria that causes cholera (99.9999% effective). 

Over the weekend, we quickly put together a broad effort to provide enough PUR to treat more than 34 million liters of clean drinking water.  President Clinton’s Initiative brought in UPS to provide free transport of PUR.  UPS has successfully moved PUR from our partner PSI, who stockpiled PUR in Panama, into Haiti and into the hands of  Paul Farmer’s group Partner’s in Health will lead the majority of the deployment focused on the epicenter of the cholera outbreak, St. Marc.  In addition, World Vision, Samaritan’s Purse, the US Agency for International Development, and Pure Compassion Ministries are all working to provide PUR in Haiti. 

I’m grateful to all of our partners and continue to be concerned that the Haiti cholera crisis could be even much bigger than it is already.  More than 305 people have perished from this terrible disease and more than 4,649 people have been hospitalized with cholera.  Let’s hope that relief agencies and the Haitian people can stop the spread of this deadly disease.

I’m pleased to announce that our partnership with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill continues to grow.  This week I attended the launch of The Water Institute at UNC, along with people from 50 different countries.  I presented a lecture  “Lessons Learned in Providing 2 Billion Liters of Clean Drinking Water in the Developing World” focused on what we’ve learned about successfully and cost effectively providing PUR.  The Water Institute is lead by my friend Dr Jamie Bartram, previously the leader of water, sanitation, and hygiene at WHO, and will be a breakthrough in bringing much needed support for the water sector.  P&G is helping fund the work of a graduate student at The Water Institute who will lead communications of the International Network to Promote Household Water Treatment and Safe Storage.  This broad Network of more than 100 organizations, which P&G helped create, will now move forward with leadership from WHO and UNICEF, and critical support from UNC. 

While at UNC, I gave a lecture at the UNC Kenan Flagler Business School along with Dr Lisa Jones-Christiansen entitled “To Be For Profit or Not for Profit:  A False Choice.  How the P&G Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program Builds Shareholder Value for P&G”.  This lecture will soon be available as a business school case study from UNC.  In addition, we connected Dr Christiansen with our upstream Pampers R&D group in order to bring some MBA volunteer resources to work on a project next semester.

At UNC, I met with Courtney Spence who is the leader of Students of the World to review the completion of their work in Tanzania to document the efforts of P&G CSDW and to discuss future projects.  I’ll share new videos from them in future blogs. Students of the World have agreed a project to help Pampers: UNICEF document their work to eliminate maternal and neonatal tetanus and Courtney will be visiting the program in Africa in December. 

We’ve been working with UNC Medical School to help people living with HIV/AIDS in Malawi.  UNC monitored the effort and recently published the results showing that providing safe drinking water with the PUR packages reduced diarrhea in mothers with HIV/AIDS and their babies when they went through weaning (Download UNC Med School HIV study in Malawi with PUR Oct 2010).  Importantly, they showed that providing PUR in the clinics along with a nutritional porridge was a great incentive to keep mothers in medical follow-up.  We’ve been discussing expansion of the effort with UNC Med School by working with Dr Mike Cohen and Dr Irving Hoffman as well as through Jim Campbell of Feed the Children Malawi.

Finally, we discussed the visit of P&G’s CEO and Chairman, Bob McDonald, who will give the keynote lecture at the graduation ceremony of UNC Kenan Flagler Business Schools. 

The highlight of my visit was having dinner with Mike Cohen, Courtney Spence, and Lisa Jones Christiansen.  We discussed how the P&G and UNC collaboration is already having an impact and how we can do much more in order to make a difference.  I felt truly blessed that these friends are giving so much effort to our partnership. 

I’m headed to Africa next to visit Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia.  Part of this trip includes hosting Pamela Crane, the winner of the Give Health Clean Water Blogivation in Kenya.  We’ll be joined by humanitarian photographer Cate Cameron. The Blogivation is a social media engagement campaign to showcase the power of bloggers and online communities to help provide clean drinking water.  This digital driven effort reached more than 3 million people in more than 80 countries.  Pamela’s efforts alone donated nearly 6,000 days of clean water in three weeks via CSDW.  Now, the Give Health effort aims to provide 100,000 days of clean drinking water by providing a new widget available to any blogger starting November 1 on www.givehealthblogivation.com.  For every click, P&G will donate one day’s worth of clean drinking water via CSDW.  You can follow our trip via Twitter @DrGregAllgood and I’ll provide some blog updates as well.