100 Million Initiative Annual Update 2026

In its first year, the 100 Million Initiative has made progress in three key areas.

1. Results-based contracts to improve drinking water services: research and successful implementation of results-based contracts with professional service providers are supporting on-going and new government partnerships that are scaling the impacts. Partnership with Uptime is expanding the integration of water safety metrics in results-based contracts to new geographies. Additionally, the team continue to support the sector, providing support to World Bank programmes on Payment for Results, convening a Community of Practice for results-based funding for safe water, working with WHO on sanitary inspections, Global Water Centre on design of water safety training, and with UNICEF on their WASH Service Delivery Models Tool.
2. Integration of climate resilience for water security: the research on climate resilience continues to influence policy through engagement on metrics for climate resilience WASH, partnership with ADB on rural water security, and continuing research with CLARE’s PALM-TREEs project.
3. Advancing equity and inclusion in water security: the Fair Water? exhibition was held in Dhaka and Manila, expanding access internationally to research on water security. This was further leveraged through social media campaign supported by ADB that reached 6 million people. The 100 Million Initiative is contributing to University of Oxford-wide training around inclusive event design and delivery and continues to publish and support dissemination of outputs from the REACH-WISER (Water InSecurity Equity and Resilience) project.