Water Forever Program

In Mexico, about half the villages in the semi-arid Mixteca Region lack adequate potable water and sanitation facilities and experience higher-than-average incidence of gastrointestinal disease and infant mortality.

Since 1998, the Hilton Foundation has supported Alternativas y Procesos de Participación Social, helping this organization develop a surface water project in villages in the Mixteca Region. The Foundation's work has emphasized environmentally sensitive watershed management to meet the needs of marginalized rural communities. Projects have included the development of dams, earthen dikes, shallow wells, conveyance lines, and storage tanks.

Results

To date, more than 200 towns and villages with more than 200,000 residents are benefiting from a variety of water, sanitation, and hygiene-related projects in the Mixteca region.

The water sources created in partnership with Alternativas y Procesos de Participación Social provide families water to meet their needs for drinking, cooking, washing, watering livestock, and small-scale irrigation. The availability of safe water has helped to improve the health and wellbeing of the people of the Mixteca Valley.

Alternativas has also laid the groundwork for maintaining these successes, fostering long-term community partnerships in support of safe water, providing training to village leaders responsible for water management, and using careful water interventions that allow watersheds to regenerate over time.