Sustainability
Chittagong Hill Tracts Project
Pictet is proud to support WaterAid's Chittagong Hill Project and donate £35,000 to bring clean tap water to village communities in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. In keeping with the theme of Prix Pictet 2008, a chosen photographer from the final shortlist will be commissioned to record the project to communicate how crucially important sustainability projects such as this one in Bangladesh are to the lives of people around the world.
Over 65 million of Bangladesh's population of 140 million have no access to sanitation. A crisis of equal magnitude is the lack of potable drinking water. Over-abstraction of water from rivers and groundwater has lowered the water table, creating salination of the water, and exposing local people to high levels of naturally found arsenic. Bangladesh has an infant mortality rate of 69 in 1000.
This Chittagong Hills Project focuses on gravity flow schemes as an innovative, but scalable approach, tapping safe water at its source in the hills and piping it to villages below. This approach, alongside tubewells and rainwater harvesting schemes, reduces radically the time spent collecting water and cuts significantly the incidence of water-related diseases. Girish Menon, International Operations Director, WaterAid said: "Projected outcomes for the project between April 2008 and March 2009 include 40 deep set tubewells, 30 infiltration galleries, 4 rainwater harvesting systems, 320 ring slab single latrines and 2,760 pit latrines. This project is typical of WaterAid's work reaching the poorest of the poor, and enabling communities in geographically hard to reach locations to get access to life-saving essential services. With the help received from Pictet, WaterAid can potentially provide 2,300 people with a lasting supply of safe water, sanitation and hygiene education."
As Ivan Pictet, Managing Partner of Pictet&Cie explains, it is important for Pictet & Cie to communicate the significance of sustainability issues "Pictet has been looking after the fortunes of families and institutions for over two hundred years. In a sense, therefore, Pictet has always followed a ‘sustainable' way of business. More recently we have aimed to place Pictet, as a business, on a more sustainable footing, from reducing the environmental and social impact of our activities to making carefully selected philanthropic contributions. This is why the Partners of Pictet & Cie have chosen to contribute to a project related to the theme of this year's Prix Pictet. WaterAid's sustainable approach is of crucial importance."