Veolia renews 5-year partnership with Red Cross

The French Red Cross and the Veolia Environnement Foundation have renewed their partnership for a further five years. Started in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch devastated Nicaragua, the aim of the partnership is to provide populations in difficulty with access to the essential services of drinking water, energy and waste collection.

Following a disaster or as part of a long-term program, Veolia Environnement’s corporate foundation offers the French Red Cross, and in particular its emergency response teams, its equipment (water treatment and distribution units), technical expertise and human resources. Through this partnership, the French Red Cross has the benefit of a durable system of volunteering skills that can be called on in crisis periods, along with equipment that provides rapid access to safe water. These skills can also be made available during non-emergency periods when a lack of safe water requires specific expertise.

Over the past 14 years, 80 volunteers from the Veolia Environnement Foundation have left on missions with the Red Cross, assisted in France by a similar number of volunteers providing logistics support. The time volunteered adds up to 1700 days on the ground during 23 missions. These include Haiti where, just after the earthquake that took place on 12 January 2010, the French Red Cross was one of the main suppliers of drinking water at assembly points in the capital Port-au-Prince. At 66 sites, water reserves and distribution bars were installed to provide a daily supply to some 180,000 people.

The Veolia Environnement Foundation continues to provide its expertise and financial aid in Haiti through the project to improve the water supply network in Petit-Goâve, the former capital, which was badly damaged by the earthquake. In similar fashion, in 2008, following a first emergency intervention in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital that was badly hit by cholera, the foundation provided support to the French Red Cross for two years in a wide-reaching program to rehabilitate the country’s main water production plants.

In September 2011, volunteers from the Veolia Environnement Foundation also accompanied an emergency response team from the French Red Cross in Chad to deal with a sudden surge in cholera, the worst since 1971. The foundation volunteers provided a safe water supply and managed the waste from the health centres.