Young Water Solutions: Milestones 2021 and outlook 2022

Young Water Fellowship (YWF) is an incubation programme created by Young Water Solutions in 2017, for empowering young entrepreneurs from countries in the global South who want to help solve water, sanitation and/or hygiene problems in their community by creating community enterprises. The programme offers them a year of support consisting of training, coaching and a seed capital grant for their business ideas.

© Young Water Solutions

The first Latin American version of the programme was launched in 2021, with the objective of validating and launching 10 start-ups led by young people (Young Water Fellows) in the region. After a year’s support, including business training focused on the water, sanitation and hygiene sector, personalised coaching, seed capital to start ventures and pilot projects, the start-ups supported were able to benefit more than 2,400 vulnerable people through providing access to safe water, improved water management and better access to sanitation/hygiene and/or wastewater treatment where conventional systems were not adequate.

© Young Water Solutions

The programme is implemented by Young Water Solutions, with technical support from CEWAS, Impact Hub CDMX and the Avina Foundation, and funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the Inter-American Development Bank and the Eurofins Foundation.

The testimony of the Saneavita Team (Brazil) gives a detailed description of this innovative start-up incubator. Their company started as a winning project in the Sanitation category at the event named “e-Hackathon on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in Informal Settlements in Latin America and the Caribbean”.

© SaneaVita Team
©SaneaVita – Soluções Baseadas na Natureza

“Young Fellowship Latin America provided us with a lot of tools for developing our business, and shared knowledge of the different areas necessary for entrepreneurship. The programme covered a number of topics, including market demand analysis, business model creation, value proposition design, prototyping, operations planning, financial management, pricing, pilot project planning, risk management, IWRM and the gender approach.

“Considering how inexperienced we were when we entered the programme, it was very important to be mentored by people skilled in the water and sanitation sector, as well as in other specific areas of entrepreneurship.” 

“With YWF we were able to look more at the real hardship of the clients, understand their difficulties and empathise and understand the precarious water and sanitation situation in Latin America. We learned to look more closely at the problem and we worked hard to come up with a value proposition that would really bring benefits to the people who are in such need of them.  We are leaving this programme definitely completely different from when we joined. Not only on the business side, but also as people. Today we are more supportive, more enthusiastic, more confident about the role we want to play in society and focused on the goal of bringing dignity to the lives of the people around us.”

The second version of the programme, which supports 11 start-ups from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, began in March 2022. They are in the virtual business training phase, which will be completed with an in-person bootcamp in Lima in June.

Useful links:
FS Young Water Fellowship Latinoamérica (spanish)
Web Young Water Fellowship Latinoamérica

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La Agencia Suiza para el Desarrollo y la Cooperación (COSUDE) es la entidad encargada de la cooperación internacional dentro del Departamento Federal de Asuntos Exteriores (DFAE). Con otras oficinas de la Confederación, la COSUDE es responsable de la coordinación general de la cooperación para el desarrollo y de la cooperación con los Países del Este, así como de los programas de ayuda humanitaria suizos.