The Monsoon Accessorize Trust is helping women in India access clean water for their families

Find out how shopping with us on Giving Tuesday (29th November 2022) can do even more good… 

In the deserts of North West India, women are responsible for finding and fetching water for their families. That means every day, 7 million women and girls must walk miles to find it. Often, when they do, it’s contaminated, meaning they’re faced with an impossible choice – certain death without water, or possible death from illness with it.  

It isn’t possible to bring home all the water a family needs for drinking, washing, cooking and cleaning in one trip. Instead, women must walk 3km trips, three times a day, to bring back enough. They walk miles, carry heavy burdens, wait for hours and pay exorbitant prices. 

On average these women walk 14,310 steps a day collecting water. The work is back-breaking and all-consuming: in the average woman’s lifetime, she wastes nine years walking for water. In the words of a 70-year-old local, Chota Devi, “I have walked for water for half my life.” This means tiny children must be left on their own, girls aren’t in classrooms, and animals and crops are left untended. 

What can we do to help? 

Water Harvest is a not-for-profit organisation in the UK that’s been providing clean water solutions to rural communities in India and Sub-Saharan Africa for 35 years. They specialise in catching and storing rainwater with special rooftop harvesting systems to provide clean, year-round drinking water. Sharing their knowledge and experience, they work with vulnerable communities to get them set up and to enable their livelihoods and land regeneration in a sustainable way that works for them. 

Water Harvest is a charity we trust, admire and have supported many times before. When we say they are truly transforming lives, we mean it. 2,021 villages now have access to clean water and more than 2 million people have benefited from their work.  

But there’s still more to do. Every £100 raised provides one person drinking water for 30 years – and £1000 can fit a roof rainwater harvesting system to a ten-person family’s home. Water Harvest’s clean water solutions give women their time and freedom back and help entire communities have access to safe, clean water every day. Watch our case study below to see the impact previous Monsoon Accessorize Trust donations have made to a village our Founder Peter Simon visited this year… 

So for Giving Tuesday this year, which falls on 29^th November 2022, we’ll be donating 20% of all global online sales to Water Harvest. With 91 million people in India lacking safe access to water, this is a huge challenge. But together, we can help. Shop on 29^th November to support. 

What is Giving Tuesday? 

Giving Tuesday falls on the Tuesday after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It started in 2012 to encourage people to do good. Fast forward a decade, and the idea has grown into a global movement that inspires millions of people to support causes around the world.