The Solidarité Eau program expands access to its documentary holdings

Founded in 1984 on the initiative of France by the European Ministers of the Environment, Programme Solidarité Eau (pS-Eau) brings together many institutional, associative and private players for a single purpose: to promote international cooperation in the area of water. By gathering together the administration, local and territorial authorities, international outreach associations, and public and private organizations of water professionals, it has set the objectives of facilitating local initiatives in international cooperation and ensuring the coherence of the projects undertaken. With a fundamental commitment: to guarantee access to drinking water to the populations who lack it in Africa and Asia.

Formed as an association since 2001, pS-Eau is developing four concrete types of action:

• it offers technical and methodological consultancy to project leaders and guides them toward partners capable of ensuring the permanence of their projects;
• it is compiling a census of the various projects and partnerships developed by French operators;
• it organizes follow-up of studies or pilot operations to highlight good practices and to facilitate their dissemination;
• it leads geographic and thematic programs to encourage synergies between the various players present.

In twenty-five years, pS-Eau has thus facilitated the completion of a large number of water access and wastewater treatment projects. At the same time, it has obviously compiled a huge body of information. Armed with these resources, it has intensified its offer of support and consultancy by providing its interlocutors with a digital library, a directory of "drinking water and sanitation" actions, action aid documents and technical files.

With the grant from the Veolia Environnement Foundation, it will now fill out this range of digital tools. The digital library will be enriched and will cover all geographic areas, reaching close to 500 references - half of them downloadable - a directory of over 20 000 contacts will list the French players in decentralized and non-governmental cooperation, their technical and financial partners, and their partners of the South, and the catalogue of projects will be completed.

Disseminated in French, English and Spanish, this information will find a ready public: from 250 daily visits in 2004, the site www.pseau.org already had more than 10 000 in 2007.