Contributing to health, the environment, and gender equality through clean drinking water
Access to clean water is a major challenge in Zambia. According to UNICEF, around 30 % of households lack basic water access and 64 % lack basic sanitation. In rural areas, many communities depend on unsafe water sources and use firewood to boil water for purification. This practice leads to household air pollution and waterborne diseases, which contribute to high mortality rates, malnutrition, and stunted growth. The use of inefficient three-stone fires also releases greenhouse gas emissions.
This climate project addresses these issues by providing sustainable access to clean water while reducing emissions and improving community well-being. It installs, rehabilitates, and maintains boreholes equipped with hand or solar-powered pumps to ensure an emission-free and reliable water supply. A maintenance programme secures consistent water quality and guarantees long-term functionality of the boreholes.
By eliminating the need to boil water, the project reduces firewood consumption, lowers greenhouse gas emissions, and decreases indoor smoke exposure — leading to improved health and a cleaner environment. It also empowers women and girls by reducing the time spent collecting water and firewood, allowing more opportunities for education, income generation, and community participation.
Project Standard
The project contributes to the the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals
According to UNICEF, 2.2 billion people worldwide lack reliable access to safe and clean drinking water – 26% of the global population. Women and girls often must travel long distances to collect water from the nearest water point. To make the water safe for use, it is typically boiled over open fires using wood, which generates carbon emissions and harmful smoke. Additionally, the collection of firewood contributes to deforestation.
Climate projects for clean drinking water offer practical solutions. Water can be treated chemically (e.g., with chlorine-based purifiers), mechanically (e.g., with water filters), or through tapping groundwater from wells. For this, wells must be repaired, maintained, or newly installed, as only functioning wells provide clean drinking water. These solutions grant even remote villages access to safe water.
Such projects also reduce carbon emissions by eliminating the need to boil water and help combat deforestation. The clean drinking water projects in ClimatePartner's portfolio are registered with international standards.
The project aims to contribute to these United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Four criteria for projects to meet quality thresholds
The life cycle of a climate project
A climate project has a set life cycle consisting of various phases, from the feasibility assessment to the retirement of Verified Emission Reductions (VERs).
The project developer reviews the general feasibility of the project, the project design, and the financing. Then, the Project Design Document (PDD) is prepared, which contains all the basic information about the project, such as the objective, location, timeline, and duration.
In this phase, independent auditors examine the PDD and the information it contains. This phase often also involves field visits with on-side interviews and analyses. Auditors are accredited, impartial assessors who have to be approved by the relevant standard as a validation and verification body (VVB). TÜV Nord/Süd, S&A Carbon LLC., and SCS Global Services are examples of VVBs."
Once validated, the project can be registered with a standard such as the Verified Carbon Standard or the Gold Standard. All high-quality climate projects are based on international standards. They provide the framework for project design, construction, carbon accounting, and monitoring. Recognised standards make the climate project system and the projects themselves resilient, traceable, and credible.
After the climate project has been registered, the monitoring begins. Here, the project developers monitor and document the data of the project activities and progress. The duration of the monitoring phase varies from project to project: it can cover two years, but documentation over five or seven years is also possible.
At the end of each monitoring phase, a VVB checks and assesses whether the values and project activities stated in the monitoring report are correct. As with validation, visits to the project site are often part of the verification process.
Once verified, the emission reductions that were confirmed in the verification phase can be issued as VERs. The steps of monitoring, verification, and issuance of VERs are repeated regularly and are therefore considered as a cycle.
Once a VER has been used, it must be retired. This process is also reflected in the registry. If the financing of a climate project is done through ClimatePartner, the VERs are bundled in a system certified by TÜV Austria and then retired on a regular basis. This ensures that each VER can no longer be sold and is only used once, preventing double counting.
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