San Francisco Business Times
by Lindsay Riddell, Reporter
Date: Thursday, August 16, 2012,
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
has awarded a $10.9 million grant to Oakland-based East Meets West
Foundation to improve sanitation and hygiene in rural Cambodia and
Vietnam.
East Meets West, an international development agency, will use the
money to fund its program, which includes sanitation and hygiene
education, installing toilets and hand washing devices in homes, and
cash payments for use of those facilities within a community.
The Foundation said 50 percent of people living in rural Vietnam and
80 percent in rural Cambodia don’t have access to sanitation facilities.
Disease resulting from the unsanitary disposal of human waste kills
about 17,000 people a year — most of those younger than five years old —
in those two countries every year.
East Meets West was founded by a LeLy Hayslip who fled Vietnam during the Vietnam war, in an effort to heal relations between the two countries. Director Oliver Stone made the movie “Heaven and Earth” based on two books Hayslip wrote chronicling her experience living in Vietnam during the war.
East Meets West aims to improve health and education of disadvantaged people in Asia through programs and financial support.
The organization, which has just 10 employees at its Oakland
headquarters, has an annual budget of $12 to $13 million this year
(which includes about $2 million of the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation grant).
John Annar,
executive director of the East Meets West Foundation, said it was an
incredibly exciting day when the organization learned it won this grant —
the first from the Gates Foundation to East Meets West.
“It felt like winning the lottery,” he said.
East Meets West piloted the hygiene and sanitation program with a $1.2 million grant from the government of Australia.
Lindsay Riddell covers energy and cleantech for the San Francisco Business Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment