Water for Good
Impact Rating

Water for Good

Top Clean Water Nonprofit

Impact: $1 provides clean water to a person for a year. Maintenance Program meets the benchmark for high cost-effectiveness. The nonprofit's cost to provide clean water is less than 75% of the local costs. Note: The impact of this program may not be representative of the entire operation of Water for Good . Governance: Passes checks Mission Tackling water poverty in one of the world's most forgotten countries. Our goal? Clean, lasting water for every man, woman, and child in the Central African Republic. Cause Clean Water Rated Program Maintenance Program Location Central African Republic Website Donations processed by the nonprofit. Cause Clean Water Rated Program Maintenance Program Location Central African Republic Website Impact Calculator: I'd like to give$ 0

Impact Calculator:

Rated Program

Program

Maintenance Program

Activities

Water for Good's local technicians maintained and monitored 1,125 water projects, keeping the clean water flowing from improved sources in rural areas of the Central African Republic, one of poorest countries in the world.

Water Access

Beneficiaries Served

People living in poverty

Geography

Central African Republic

Outcomes: Changes in people's lives. They can be caused by a nonprofit.

Costs: The money spent by nonprofits and their partners and beneficiaries.

Impact: The cost to achieve an outcome.

Cost-effectiveness: A judgment as to whether the cost was "worth" the outcome.

Outcomes

Outcome Metric

A year of clean water provided to a person.

To calculate impact, we estimate how many outcomes the nonprofit caused.

Data Source

Outcome data collected through local staff, who complete electronic reports on-site during service visits, providing photo and G.P.S. verification water project location and functionality. Beneficiary numbers are self-reported by community members and capped at 1,000 people per project.

Time Period of Data

Jan. 1, 2017, to Dec. 31, 2017

Ratings are based on data the nonprofit itself collects on its work. We use the most recent year with sufficient data. Typically, this data allows us to calculate direct changes in participants' lives, such as increased income.

Method for Attributing Outcomes

Water for Good conservatively estimates that 56 percent of water projects in the Central African Republic would be functional without Water for Good's maintenance program, and 90 percent of projects are functional with the program. Thus, Water for Good attributes 44 percent of people who have access now to the maintenance program.

To determine causation, we take the outcomes we observe and subtract an estimate of the outcomes that would have happened even without the program.

Cost

Data Source

Cost data reported by Water for Good and data and assumptions about partner and beneficiary costs.

All monetary costs are counted, whether they are borne by a nonprofit service deliverer or by the nonprofit’s public and private partners.

Impact

Impact Statement

\$1 provides clean water to a person for a year.

We calculate impact, defined as the change in outcomes attributable to a program divided by the cost to achieve those outcomes.

Rating

Benchmark for Rating

Impact ratings of water access programs are based on the cost to provide clean water relative to the market cost that a person incurs to buy water in that country. Programs receive 5 stars if they provide water for less than 75% of the estimated market costs, and 4 stars if they do so for less than 125%. If a nonprofit reports impact but doesn't meet the benchmark for cost-effectiveness, it earns 3 stars.

Determination

The nonprofit's cost to provide clean water is less than 75% of the local costs.

Why We Could Be Wrong

We welcome your suggestions for improving our methodology. Our methodology section includes explanations of how we mitigate these issues.

• The outcome could oversimplify total impact. Using “person-years of clean water” as the metric of analysis does not capture differences in the water quantity, reliability and ease of access.
• There could be multiple important outcomes not captured in our analysis.
• Water for Good may be spending additional money in order to serve harder-to-reach and/or particularly valuable populations.
• In the absence of better data, we assume uniform counterfactual rates for programs, at the risk of masking variation across nonprofits.
• Our estimates rely on data made public by Water for Good on its website, annual reports, financial statements and Form 990s.
• We only analyze programs that meet our criteria. As a result, this report may not fully reflect the impact of Water for Good .
• We do not assess what explains the nonprofit's cost-effectiveness.

We assign a rating to the nonprofit using the rubric:

• There are indications of governance or financial health issues at the nonprofit.

• After being given an opportunity, the nonprofit chose not to publish impact information.

We are not yet issuing this level of star rating.

• The rated program does not meet our benchmark for cost-effectiveness.

• The rated program is cost-effective.

• The rated program is highly cost-effective.

Nonprofit Comment

Not provided. This may be because we lacked contact information for Water for Good or it chose not to comment. If you are a representative of this nonprofit, contact us to review and comment on your rating.

Before publishing, we ask every nonprofit we can to review our work, offer corrections and provide a comment.

Analysis Details

Analysis conducted by ImpactMatters and published on November 22, 2019.

This rating is based on data reported by Water for Good using ImpactMatters' impact reporting platform. Using data from the platform, ImpactMatters analysts calculated impact and assigned a rating.

We welcome corrections. If you are interested in exploring applications of ImpactMatters data, contact us at partnerships@impactmatters.org.

Governance Check

Water for Good passes our governance check.

Conducted a financial audit

Overhead spending is reasonable (<35% of total spending)

Charity Navigator has not issued a fraud or mismanagement advisory

Water for Good itself has not reported any material diversions of assets

Water for Good itself has not reported any excess benefit transactions

Source: Water for Good Form 990 and Charity Navigator

How We Calculate Impact

This rating is based on ImpactMatters analysis of the impact of Maintenance Program relative to costs. Impact is the change in the social outcomes of people served by the program, net of the change that would have happened even without the program (the “counterfactual”); divided by cost. Learn more.

A guide to our process for analyzing nonprofits and assigning ratings.

Learn about best practices for reporting impact for different program types.

Our collected guidelines on how we analyze impact of nonprofit programs.

Rating is a complex exercise and we urge you to read our frequently asked questions for details of how and why we issue these ratings.