Billions of people and their livelihoods around the world are threatened by the water security crisis. Water security is essential for life, health and prosperity, forming the foundation for safe communities, sustainable growth, and resilient ecosystems, while ensuring that water-related risks are managed effectively. Without water security, billions of people are left vulnerable to health and environmental risks, food scarcity, and economic instability.
With an increasing demand for water, and the accelerating impacts of rising temperatures and disrupted water cycles in storms, floods and droughts, this crisis is becoming more urgent by the day, demanding immediate action. Helping people to become more water secure protects not only their physical well-being but also their collective future, allowing societies and economies to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
Water impacts every aspect of life, across all the development sectors with shared dependences on water, from agriculture, energy, healthcare, industry, education, environment, public utilities, transportation, to recreation. However, efforts to address intersecting challenges between them are fragmented across sectors, with each organization focusing on different pieces of the puzzle, rather than the bigger picture.
Collective Action for a Water-Secure World (C4W) enables the dismantling of silos that obstruct collaboration on water security. We urgently drive the collective action necessary to tackle the global water security crisis at scale. C4W raises funds to finance science-based solutions through collective action to create a water-secure world. As a US-based registered non-profit organization, C4W brings together complementary and aligned organizations, harnessing their combined expertise and capacity to implement large-scale interventions that improve water security.
A water-secure world where collective action drives scalable, cross-sector, science-based solutions to the water security crisis, transforming communities and lives.
C4W funds high-impact, science-based solutions that deliver transformative, large-scale interventions across sectors—to reshape policies, empower communities, and catalyze systemic change. Through a rigorous, expert-driven approach which unites a diverse range of stakeholders to forge powerful, strategic partnerships, C4W accelerates progress towards a water-secure world. In so doing, it ensures a lasting, measurable impact on global water security for generations to come.
C4W’s initial work is guided by the Transformative Futures for Water Security (TFWS) initiative. This was a year-long South–South dialogue held in the run-up to the UN 2023 Water Conference, which saw over 1,000 experts from 400 institutions jointly identify eight missions for water security. These missions—reflecting the most urgent water security pressures facing people right now—guide our work. The first program that C4W is funding addresses the first mission to build farmers’ resilience to all the water related challenges they face. It is a collective action program with multiple partners, coordinated and led by International Water Management Institute (IWMI)
C4W was founded with the support of IWMI, an international research–for–development organization solving water problems. IWMI has a unique track record of working with governments, farmers, water managers, development partners and businesses to create scalable, science-based solutions to the world’s water challenges.
As a founding partner of C4W, IWMI provides initial funding, strategic and program implementation support as well as technical excellence and insights from 40 years of cutting-edge research, innovation and learning. C4W benefits from IWMI’s portfolio of interventions and partner networks across Africa and Asia. IWMI is a CGIAR Research Center with offices in 15 countries and a global network of scientists operating in more than 55 countries.