Mapping the Blue Thread

Christ-Centered and Rooted in Faith

World Vision’s WASH programs are guided by a Christ-centered mission, integrating faith into actions to foster holistic transformation. This approach strengthens trust, engages local faith leaders, and aligns efforts with spiritual and physical well-being.

• Faith Integration: Embeds Christian values in program design and implementation.
• Partnerships with Faith Leaders: Engages churches and interfaith communities for broader impact.
• Holistic Transformation: Addresses spiritual, emotional, and physical needs.

Country-specific, Entrepreneurial Strategies

These strategies empower national teams to craft growth-oriented business plans tailored to their unique contexts. By fostering innovation, resource optimization, and local leadership, this approach drives sustainable impact and scalability.

• Visionary Growth: Develops ambitious, context-specific plans to transform WASH efforts.
• Innovative Leadership: Encourages local teams to lead with new technologies and approaches.
• Resilience: Diversifies funding streams and builds local capacity for long-term sustainability.

Adaptive Implementation and Decision-Making

Adaptive implementation emphasizes flexibility, data-driven adjustments, and local empowerment to navigate complex, dynamic environments. This approach promotes innovation, continuous learning, and sustainable progress.

• Local Empowerment: Places decision-making authority close to the ground for contextual relevance.
• Real-Time Adjustments: Uses data to pivot strategies and optimize impact.
• Iterative Learning: Continuously refines approaches based on successes and challenges.

Geographic Thinking and Conceptualization

This approach integrates geographic, cultural, and environmental contexts to optimize WASH interventions. By leveraging geospatial tools like mWater, it ensures strategic placement, monitoring, and holistic planning for sustainable and impactful programming.

• Geospatial Integration: Uses tools like mWater to map and prioritize interventions.
• Contextual Awareness: Aligns interventions with cultural, environmental, and socio-economic realities.
• Cross-Sector Collaboration: Links WASH with health, education, and other sectors for integrated impact.

Water Supply and Water Quality

Our 2026–2030 WASH Business Plan challenges the assumption that all water systems inherently provide quality services by fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Key focus areas include improving infrastructure quality, increasing residual water disinfection, ensuring high-quality material procurement, and enhancing accountability through remote monitoring. 

Through our SAFER framework, we aim to ensure water services are:

• Safe, with certified materials, effective water treatment, and post-construction quality monitoring
• Accessible, addressing diverse community needs through inclusive design
• Functional, by implementing robust quality assurance and quality control practices and digital data management
• Equitable, using evidence and tools to promote WASH services that are delivered in sufficient qualities and quantities to all people
• Resilient, leveraging remote monitoring and climate-adaptive designs to support sustainable operation

Sanitation and Hygiene

World Vision’s new sanitation and hygiene strategy aims to deliver sustainable and equitable improvements for the most vulnerable populations. Moving beyond traditional community-led approaches, we embrace a comprehensive model that integrates community-driven demand, robust supply chains, effective governance, and innovative financing solutions.

By supporting entire sanitation value chains and collaborating with governments, private sector actors, and communities, we ensure access to affordable, high-quality products and services, particularly for marginalized households. Regular monitoring and adaptive learning help us refine our strategies to remain effective across diverse contexts. Our ultimate goal is universal sanitation and hygiene coverage, improving public health, empowering communities, and fostering resilience.

Governance and Finance

Our new business plan adopts a service-centered approach to address the systemic challenges to safe and reliable WASH services. Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 requires moving beyond infrastructure projects to transform how services are planned, financed, implemented, maintained, monitored, and regulated. This approach involves strengthening the enabling environment by assessing policy gaps and supporting governments and communities to adopt robust WASH frameworks.

We collaborate with WASH service authorities to plan for universal service coverage, addressing data gaps, creating master plans, and ensuring accountability for service delivery. We emphasize service financing by facilitating access to new funding sources, blending tariffs, taxes, and transfers to cover operational and maintenance costs. Our approach leverages alternative financing to expand access to WASH services, empowering governments to reach more people and creating the financial flexibility for households to invest in WASH.

Water Security

Under our new WASH business plan, World Vision will help build a water-secure future by implementing best practices from Integrated Water Resources Management more broadly and source water protection specifically to safeguard the raw water resources so vital to the health and well-being of the communities we serve. By leveraging geospatial technology, nature-based solutions like farmer-managed natural regeneration, and community capacity-building, we aim to restore and protect the ecosystems in priority watersheds that capture, filter, and supply water to critical World Vision–supported WASH infrastructure.

Through climate-focused, risk-based planning and resilient infrastructure design, we collaborate with local governments and stakeholders, ensuring sustainable resource management. This approach emphasizes data stewardship, hydrological monitoring, and capacity-building to protect water resources for current and future generations.

Disaster Management

World Vision’s disaster management approach delivers lifesaving WASH interventions during emergencies and displacements caused by climate events, conflicts, and natural disasters, while building resilience for long-term development. By integrating early warning systems, disaster risk reduction, and climate-resilient infrastructure, we empower communities to adapt and mitigate future risks.

Our strategy includes preparedness, emergency water supply, sanitation services, hygiene promotion, and system repairs, coordinated with local governments and partners to align with municipal plans and avoid duplication. Committed to locally led action, we strengthen national partnerships and integrate WASH with health, livelihoods, and child protection initiatives, ensuring that immediate relief transitions into sustainable, resilient development.

Community and Government Engagement

Aligns WASH initiatives with local needs and priorities through collaboration with communities and governments for sustained impact.

Local Partnerships

Strengthens programs by pooling resources and expertise through collaborative efforts with local organizations.

Staff Growth and Engagement

Builds capacity, motivation, and retention of staff to ensure high-quality performance and innovation in WASH programming.

Faith Integration

Embeds Christian principles into WASH efforts to foster trust, respect, and spiritual transformation alongside technical solutions.

Quality Control and Assurance

Ensures all interventions meet rigorous standards to deliver consistent, sustainable, and equitable outcomes.

Monitoring

Implements continuous data collection and feedback loops to track progress, inform decisions, and refine strategies for maximum effectiveness.

Applied Learning

Incorporates lessons learned into program design and execution while fostering knowledge-sharing across teams and countries.

Multi-sector Integration

Enhances impact by connecting WASH with health, education, and livelihoods initiatives to address broader community needs.

Reporting and Communication

Ensures transparency and accountability through consistent messaging and updates to stakeholders on program outcomes.

Gender Equality, Disability, and Social Inclusion

Promotes equitable access and active involvement of underrepresented groups, especially women, in decision-making processes.

Universal Service Coverage (USC)

This initiative aims for 90% basic drinking water access in specific districts by aligning with government boundaries. It fosters strong collaboration with local governments and partners to ensure inclusive, measurable progress.

• Broad Reach: Targets entire populations within government-defined boundaries.
• Collaborative Planning: Leverages co-financing and partnerships with utilities.
• Evidence-Based Impact: Uses mWater tracking and household surveys for progress validation.

Market-Based Sanitation (MBS)

This initiative promotes sustainable sanitation access by strengthening market systems. By treating people as customers, not beneficiaries, it fosters demand, builds supply chains, and enables financing for durable sanitation solutions.

• Behavioral Focus: Catalyzes demand with tailored, market-driven approaches.
• Private Sector Role: Supports entrepreneurs and masons to deliver sanitation products.
• Scalable Model: Combines governance, financing, and supply chain improvements.

WASH Financing Solutions

This initiative leverages innovative financing to expand WASH services by blending donor funds with local investments. The Blue Thread Global Water Fund plays a central role in reducing risk for financial institutions, unlocking capital for infrastructure and community improvements.

• Investment Mobilization: Attracts domestic funding to multiply donor impact.
• Capacity Building: Strengthens local institutions and service providers.
• Impactful Reach: Enables underserved communities to gain access to water and sanitation.

Women-Centered Design

This initiative deepens World Vision’s WASH impact by addressing the empowerment and flourishing of women and girls through sectoral integration. By targeting specific geographic areas, it emphasizes inclusive WASH design, operations, and maintenance planning tailored to women’s needs, along with mindset change and GEDSI (Gender Equality, Disability, and Social Inclusion) training for lasting impact.

• Inclusive Design: Focuses on women, girls, and people with disabilities with adherence to quality standards.
• Empowered Mindset: Incorporates GEDSI assessments and the Empowered Worldview Approach.
• Integrated Action: Collaborates with other sectors like health, education, or livelihoods for holistic impact.

Water Resource Management

Focused on safeguarding water quality and availability, this initiative protects ecosystems and watersheds critical for community health. It employs Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and Source Water Protection strategies to build a water-secure future while mitigating risks like floods and droughts.

• Sustainability: Protects source waters and critical recharge zones for long-term water security.
• Impact Tracking: Measures hectares under improved water resource management.
• Community Resilience: Engages local stakeholders to strengthen water stewardship.

WASH in Fragile Contexts

This adaptive WASH initiative delivers sustainable services in fragile settings, targeting conflict, environmental, and socio-economic vulnerabilities. It aims to reduce fragility and foster resilience while prioritizing the most vulnerable communities.

• Resilient WASH Services: Focused on sustainable and adaptable water and sanitation solutions.
• Fragility Metrics: Tracks impacts with indices like the Fragility Exposure Index (FEI).
• Collaboration: Integrates WASH efforts with local governments and global partners.