our partners

The Royal Bank of Canada has launched the RBC Blue Water Project, a wide-ranging multi-year program to help foster a culture of water stewardship in Canada and abroad, so that people have clean fresh water today and tomorrow. Water has become an integral part of RBC's commitment to sustaining the environment because water is fundamental to the sustainability of all life on the planet.

RBC has selected the Institute for Public Health and Water Research and its affiliated partner, the Texas A&M Health Science Center, to receive a grant for $300,000 in support of the RBC Blue Water Project. The grant will support an initiative intended to deliver safe drinking water systems to the school children and rural communities of Trinidad and Tobago while delineating the health, social, economical and educational impact of water provisioning, health literacy regarding hygiene, sanitation and safe water management to the selected communities.

Successful delivery of this intervention will reduce the economic and health burden currently experienced as these communities who rely solely on water acquisition through water tankers. Reliance on this water is becoming uneconomic and unsustainable especially with recent increases in costs of energy and the added complexity of climate change impacting the capacity to capture and store rainfall for potable conversion.

Working with local communities, over three phases, discovery, education, design, implementation, testing and evaluation of sustainable rain water collection and treatment systems will be deployed. Key learnings from this project will be disseminated in technical and non-technical sources to demonstrate best practices regarding the significance of water to improving human health globally. This project will also inform processes for capacity building among communities when engaged in sustainable water acquisitioning among diverse populations.

Read the 2009 Canadian Water Attitudes Study, commissioned by RBC and Unilever Canada.