WaterAid fundraising in Uganda

BLOG ACTION DAY 2010: WATER

We want to share with you our colleagues visit to Uganda with WaterAid. Dave McGlinchey who is a management accountant at Yorkshire Water and WaterAid's regional representative wanted to see for himself how our fundraising efforts contribute to clean water and sanitation projects.

Dave, and 11 other representatives from UK water companies, visited slums in Kampala and rural villages in the west of the country. During his trip he kept a blog. Here he gives us a taste of his experiences.

http://wateraiduganda.blogspot.com/

Why we should value water more

BLOG ACTION DAY 2010: WATER

Water is often something that is taken for granted until we actually don't have it. Given the topic of today's blog action day - we wanted to give you a little insight into all the work that actually goes into getting fresh water into your homes with a little help from our Yorkshire spokes grannies Edna and Mary.

From reservoirs, rivers and boreholes right across Yorkshire, we take water to our treatment works, treat it to the highest quality then send it out via our Yorkshire grid to customers homes - for a behind the scenes tour check out Edna and Mary's Round the U bend tour...

For lots of ways to save water and to order a free water saving pack full of water saving gadgets visit www.yorkshirewater.com/savewater

Getting behind blogger action day

Today is blogger action day and we are glad to be supporting this year's theme - water and the fact that it should become a basic human right in developing countries across the world. Today we would encourage people to sign the petition above.

As a water company we work closely with international charity WaterAid to help raise funds to support the fantastic work that they do in developing countries.

In the last decade, Yorkshire Water has raised nearly £4m for WaterAid, the international charity which helps to provide and improve access to safe water, hygiene and sanitation to some of the world’s poorest countries.

Today we want to share with you the fundraising work we have done and the experiences that our colleagues have had when visting some of WaterAid's partner countries.

In 2007 Christina Chinnian,capital efficiency manager at Yorkshire Water went on a WaterAid supporters visit to India visting WaterAid projects and also the slums - a very emotional trip that she captured on her blog. Definitely worth a look
http://cmblackburn.blogspot.com/

A selection of pictures from Christina's visit are above

Don't forget to tell us your stories...

Blog Action Day - 15th October

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Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action.

This year the blog subject is water, and the main issue up for discussion is the fact that almost a billion people across the globe don't have access to safe, clean drinking water.

As one of the UK's major providers of drinking water, this is clearly an issue that is close to our hearts and we will be using this blog to highlight some of the work with have done in partnership with international charity WaterAid to try and address this problem in developing nations.

We would also love to get your thoughts on this in terms of what else could be done, examples of any success stories that you may have come across, any individual or company achievements and also just people's general views on this issue.

Throughout the day we will be making regular updates to this blog but for further information you can visit the official website

Why isn't water free?