$100 provides water and sanitation for one Guatemalan FOR LIFE

Helping One Village At A Time

Who We Are

Our Mission

The People’s Consultants aka Agua del Pueblo USA, will provide transparent, objective and cost-effective service to rural Guatemalans. We will strive to objectively evaluate our projects over the long term after completion.

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adp photos Proyecto Amistad Gris jeep , 1973 James McCarthy, Artemio Tuj Mendoza, Bruce Cl

Our History

Founded in 1972 by a team of young, international volunteer civil, environmental, mechanical, industrial and nuclear engineers; architects; sociologists and economists. Their Pollyannaish goal was to address poverty among the poorest of the poor. Your help has made their dream a reality for more than 500,000 poor Guatemalans.

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Our Projects

We recently completed our 2022 Summit in Guatemala. Two of our board members visited various Agua del Pueblo projects and participated in our 50th-year anniversary celebrations. Check out one of our most recently completed projects, Sanik Ya and Chitulul on the projects page.

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We are the OLDEST NGO focused on
water and sanitation in the world!

Potable Water

You’d probably guess that as our name implies, we have spent a good deal of our engineering expertise on developing water infrastructure. In our early days the majority of our projects were spring captured gravity systems. Those opportunities were the ‘low hanging fruit’. The beauty of these projects is the incredibly low cost of operation and maintenance. However, all of our systems include a community “tax”. That is every beneficiary family pays a monthly fee for operation and maintenance.

Sanitation

We've focus on sanitation due to WHO data that has shown that sanitaion is more cost effective than water for health. However, our beneficiares consider many other factors in addition to health that water provides. At a minimum all beneficiaries install a ventilated improved pit latrines. Recently we have added hand washing stations. We are also experimenting with more comprehensive systems that incorporate laundry wathing (pilas). These systems connect several homes to a grease trap, biodigester and wetland treatment.

Community Development

Water and sanitation are means, not an end: We developed and honed our methodology for the past 50 years. The heart of the methodology in community control. That is, in every AdP project the community must take the lead in all decisions from our first visit to the operation and maintenance of the system. Researchers have found that the community leadership leads to community and economic development (Chipman, Strait and Clemens, 2014; Sauer, Smith & Clemens, 2012; Clemens & Douglas, 2012).