Dear community members,

As VIA Water is heading for a new future, this community will come to an end. Started out in 2014, the first phase of the programme has finished and we are looking forward to enter the second phase.

Aqua for All (of which VIA Water is part) has started its new 5-year programme ‘Making Water Count’ (check the brochure here). Once again, we will try our utmost to facilitate and finance access to water and sanitation. Aqua for All will use grant money to mobilize public and private capital in order to increase investments in water and sanitation.

We will work with 2 windows of opportunities:

• VIA Water: Supports early stage water & sanitation innovations (€ 10 Million)

• SCALE: Supports proven solutions and develops service & finance models to unlock private capital and reach scale (€ 20 Million)

Want to know more about these windows?
Check this information page https://aquaforall.org/we-are-ready-for-applications/

Website as a reference
At this moment, a new website for Aqua for All is being developed. In the future, all updates and information concerning VIA Water proposals and projects can be found there. This VIA Water-website (www.viawater.nl) will remain online as a very valuable reference to show all the VIA Water projects we supported in the period 2014-2019. It is an impressive track record we can be proud of.

This means that our community hub will come to an end, too. We started it, believing that members would enrich their knowledge through sharing their own experiences (good and bad), seeking advice from peers, knowing that their knowledge and questions would be of high value to fellow members in their journey to innovation.

The challenge of sharing
We will be honest with you: the online community hub did not raise the level of commitment we hoped for at the start. Though some members were very active in posting their experiences and project progress, for many others it appeared to be a challenge to contribute on a regular basis to the hub.

We are still not sure why this was the case. Of course, we all know: it is not easy publicly sharing what does not work. But towards the end of the programme, we saw that people were starting to share more. Was it because it was a condition in our contract? Or because there were results to share to be proud of?

Like with all innovations, it’s only in hindsight that you see what would have worked better. But it was certainly worth trying it this way.

Live events
Our live events, at the other hand, had much more impact. These generated a lot of positive energy for the attendants and will certainly be continued in the future.

So, is this the end of our community hub? Of course not! Currently, we are working out a new way of connecting innovators and project owners. Fortunately, there are high quality digital tools available that can facilitate an interactive, user-friendly web platform on which a new hub can be built, for the benefit of all future innovators and project owners.

Want to remain involved with our new programme?
Check this information page https://aquaforall.org/we-are-ready-for-applications/
Note: the new community platform will be a closed community: only for applicants/project owners, so not open to anybody, as is this hub.

Please subscribe to the newsletter of Aqua for All for future updates: https://aquaforall.org/newsletter/