Friday, August 17, 2012

Gates Foundation awards $11M to East Meets West

Thursday, August 16, 2012
By Lindsay Riddell, Reporter
San Francisco Business Times

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $10.9 million grant to Oakland-based East Meets West Foundation to improve sanitation and hygiene in rural Cambodia and Vietnam.

East Meets West, an international development agency, will use the money to fund its program, which includes sanitation and hygiene education, installing toilets and hand washing devices in homes, and cash payments for use of those facilities within a community.

The Foundation said 50 percent of people living in rural Vietnam and 80 percent in rural Cambodia don’t have access to sanitation facilities. Disease resulting from the unsanitary disposal of human waste kills about 17,000 people a year — most of those younger than five years old — in those two countries every year.

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