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For more information and to offer your support, please contact:

Sweta Daga

202.778.1633

On January 9, 2008 the Global Water Challenge will launch a Changemakers competition focused on water and sanitation innovations at the community level.

This competition will source high impact solutions and offer a voice to those innovators that often go unheard. It presents a unique opportunity to join local innovation with international leverage answering the need to identify innovations with scalable business models.

The Global Water Challenge — Changemakers competition will last roughly three and a half months and source water and sanitation innovations from across the globe. Throughout the collaborative competition entries will be displayed online — open and transparent — where anyone can view and post comments or questions. This transparent process allows isolated innovators to connect with a broad community to refine and spread their innovations, creating a unique learning experience for all with a credible space to increase innovation, scale, and impact.

Participants in Changemakers Collaborative Competitions compete openly to surface the most promising solutions, and then collaborate to refine, enrich, and implement them. The competitions' primary audiences are most often innovative citizen sector organizations (implementers and investors), social entrepreneurs, and business entrepreneurs, but have also included innovative academic institutions, governments, and individuals of all ages.

Changemakers begins each collaborative competition by creating, with its partners, a "Mosaic of Innovative Solutions" which serves as an intellectual framework for the entire competition and resulting collaborations. Each mosaic maps, at a glance, the most powerful emerging principles of innovation in the sector against underlying factors that drive a problem. The mosaic helps social innovators see how their work fits into a larger picture, and demonstrates visually how the collective impact of solutions is greater than the sum of the individual projects.

At the end of the entry period a select group of judges will choose roughly 12 finalists based on the entries' level of innovation, impact, and sustainability. These finalists will be posted online for the general public to vote for three winners who will each receive $5,000.

This competition will open a new, aggregated network of innovations to Global Water Challenge members and beyond. Additionally, the process will lead to the emergence of new insights and trends that will help inform the work and decisions of the water and sanitation field at large.

• Join the Global Water Challenge in generating a global movement to meet the needs for safe water and sanitation;
• Nominate successful water and sanitation innovators; spread the word about the competition;
• Enter your work in the global competition.

This is a unique opportunity for the Global Water Challenge to continue our mission of supporting communities and entrepreneurs that produce sustainable, replicable, and scalable results and raising awareness about society's critical water and sanitations needs.

http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competition/waterandsanitation