The Peer Water Exchange (PWX) is a participatory system to select, fund, manage, monitor, and share grassroots water and sanitation projects worldwide efficiently, effectively, and transparently.

Local, grassroots projects are the key to solving the global water crisis in rural and remote areas. These diverse efforts involve community ownership, sanitation, hygiene education, change in behavior, and long-term maintenance and evaluation -- unlike vaccination programs -- and thus have historically been hard to scale. Today we have solutions to solve our drinking water problems, but not the infrastructure to fund, select, manage, monitor, and share these grassroots, community solutions.

Blue Planet Run Foundation (BPRF) has a goal to bring safe drinking water to 200 million people by 2027. BPRF estimated that it would need to select, fund, and manage over 40,000 water projects and, finding the current mechanisms unable to scale up, created PWX.

PWX is a new infrastructure for funding, soliciting, selecting, managing, and evaluating water projects worldwide. It distributes the work to eliminate bottlenecks and helps people do the work that they are best at, while eliminating bureaucracy and paperwork. Most importantly, it reduces competitive behavior and increases cooperation and knowledge sharing.

Our goal is to empower grassroots implementers by using a new combination of people, process, and technology to allow them to participate in the decision-making process. PWX creates an live knowledge-base of of all the work done, communication exchanged, and reports both successes and failures from around the world. We enable field-level low-cost resources to assess the long-term the impact of the work. PWX will change the existing funding and management model by:

• A transparent participatory decision-making process for funding projects
• Minimal overhead during project review, selection, and evaluation
• Enforcing sharing and learning between organizations
• Managing and tracking project progress transparently online
• Assessing long-term impact at extremely low cost
• Increasing the number of resources to successfully tackle the drinking water crisis.

Through PWX, implementer, funder, and observer organizations will form a global network to collaborate with each focusing on their core competency. Funder organizations will focus on raising money and oversee the system; implementers will select projects, implement solutions, evaluate each other's work, and share their successes and failures; and observer organizations will help with assessing long-term impact.

Blue Planet Run Foundation (BPRF) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing safe drinking water to everyone in the world. A milestone for this vision is to provide safe drinking water for 200 million people for life by 2027. BPRF aims to achieve this target through organizing the Blue Planet Run, the first of which started on June 1 and finished on September 4, 2007. This global event will be followed by nine more such global events every two years. The Blue Planet Run will raise awareness of the drinking water crisis and the funds for water projects. BPRF will use PWX to coordinate with partner agencies around the world to successfully implement water projects.

Sapient, a business innovator, turned Blue Planet Run's vision for PWX into reality by combining its expertise in program management and technology with an unwavering passion for helping clients succeed. Sapient has a long track record helping large global businesses and government agencies to achieve extraordinary results from their customer relationships, business operations and technology.