EN
Back in 2010, everybody started talking about the potential of water entrepreneurship. But nobody was actively doing something for it.
So we decided to create the Swiss NGO Cewas, the world's first dedicated water and sanitation entrepreneurship organisation for impact-oriented solutions.
In 2011, we incubated our first batch of early-stage entrepreneurs in the beautiful city of Willisau in the heart of Switzerland. The one-year programme turned out to be a full success.
We soon realised that we need to go where the most challenging water and sanitation problems prevail. So we went out and started to conduct our programmes all over the world.
Slowly but steadily more water entrepreneurs built their business and needed a different kind of support. In 2015 we tested our first acceleration programme with 3 more advanced enterprises. Since 2019 we shifted our main attention from early to later stage water entrepreneurship support through our acceleration and scaling programmes. Alongside, we focused increasingly on developing supportive ecosystems and markets. Today, we engage and capacitate market actors and investors in the water sector in all our focus countries.
Our compass points to SDG-6. We are water and sanitation experts and believe in a strong integration of this sector and entrepreneurship to achieve lasting impact.
We work with entrepreneurs and think like entrepreneurs. We are constantly developing new and improved solutions to support water enterprises and ecosystem partners.
Our team implements programmes in emerging markets across the world. Context understanding, local networks and market knowledge are key to all our work.
In order to help water enterprises succeed, we invest in sector-specific entrepreneurship ecosystem development, together with support institutions, industry experts and investors.
We are not the ones creating impact, the enterprises are. Our efforts are geared towards enterprises generating, scaling and managing impact.
Building enterprises, ecosystems and markets takes time and many hands. We like to focus on our area of expertise and collaborate with like-minded partners.
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