Team H2Ok Members- Arthur Daw, Carrie Eller, Grant Thompson, Hiu-Yeung Chow, Howard Wilcox, James Woodrow, Jeremy Steel, Julia Witton-Dauris, Kate Sandford, Matthew Brimble, Sam Cheetham, Sandra Tufvesson, Serena Gosden and Vessy Dobreva.

Hi there! Thanks for taking the time to visit our JustGiving page.

We are team H2Ok, a collective of young professionals with backgrounds in engineering related disciplines, and we are fundraising on behalf of WaterAid as entrants to the Water Innovators employee development challenge. Throughout the course of 2016, we will be aiming to SOLVE, FUND and LEARN in the name of WaterAid, with the intention to deliver both a technical solution and fundraising proceeds which may contribute to the betterment of lives of the inhabitants of Lake Tonlé Sap in Cambodia, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia.

We are committed to raising a minimum of £3000 on behalf of WaterAid which shall be put towards the implementation of 'Community Led Total Sanitation' – for more information on this and how it relates to the technical challenge we are also working to solve, please read on to the ‘background’ section at the bottom of this page.

Through a wide-ranging programme of events including cake sales, pub quizzes, raffles and many more, we hope to raise some of our target; you can expect to see the proceeds of these activities being deposited every month. However, our main fundraising efforts revolve around one single event – the Wimbleball Lake Challenge.
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THE CHALLENGE

On August 13th, the Water Innovators team will be heading down to Exmoor in order to complete as many laps as possible of Wimbleball Lake over an eight hour period, with the target to perform the collective equivalent of circumnavigating the Tonle Sap lake during dry season – an enormous distance of 391 km. On condition of payment of our blood, sweat and tears (hopefully less of these), we hope that you may be willing to sponsor us as we undertake this challenge.

Any donations you can provide, no matter the size, will be greatly appreciated and shall support WaterAid enormously. If you really want one of us to suffer, why not sponsor us per kilometre we travel? Nothing would incentivise us more!

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity. So it’s the most efficient way to donate – saving time and cutting costs for the charity.

See how we’re doing... To follow the build-up to our Wimbleball challenge and keep up with our progress, make sure to follow us:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/H2OkWaterAid/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/h2okwaterinnovators/

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BACKGROUND

The Tonlé Sap is of enormous importance to the 100,000 people who reside upon it within floating communities; as one of the world’s most productive ecosystems, the role of the lake is vital in providing a fishing-based economy which sustains their livelihood and culture. However, due to poverty, enduring perceptions and a lack of awareness of the consequences of their actions, these people are prone to the practice open defecation into waters from which they drink, bathe and fish, posing an enormous threat to health and wellbeing.

WaterAid are operating in partnership with Wetlands Work with the intention to eradicate this behaviour through the implementation of ‘Community Led Total Sanitation’ – an approach to supply both the hardware and the root awareness necessary to enable this behavioural transition. As a team, we are operating on their behalf in taking on the dual challenges to develop a robust, community-scale version of the HandyPod sanitation system suitable for the Tonlé Saps challenging environment, and to generate the funds that can assist in its implementation.

For more information on the HandyPod, please follow the below link:
https://wetlandswork.com/products-and-services/sanitation-in-challenging-environments/handy-pods/

By the end of the Water Innovators process, we shall have produced a technical report complete with our design and implementation strategy for an up-scaled HandyPod system. If you would like to know more, please get in touch with us via our Team H2Ok Facebook account.