Glastonbury Festival Of Contemporary Performing Arts - Charities - WaterAid

WaterAid at Glastonbury Festival 2009

2009 blessed us with a hot, sunny weekend at Glastonbury, what a treat!

Our presence at the Festival was another great opportunity to talk to lots of different people about our work. We collected over 18,000 petitions calling on Gordon Brown to be a sanitation champion. MP Nick Clegg, Leader of the Lib Dems, even stopped by to add his name.

From welly shies and tug o' wars to sack races and space hoppers, there was much fun to be had on Saturday when WaterAid held a fete-themed day behind the Pyramid stage which included fantastic performances from Tinariwen, Baaba Maal and Emmy the Great. The day gave us the opportunity to raise awareness of our work to those working at the festival including a host of stars who gave us their support including VV Brown, Paulo Nutini, Jo Wiley and Maximo Park.

As always, our volunteers worked tirelessly around the site: cleaning the loos; running the African style pit latrines and She Pees; collecting petitions and manning the stand. 

Thanks so much to all you Festival-goers for supporting us, see you next year! 

Find out more about what we got up to, read through our micro-blog which was updated live using Twitter throughout the festival.

WaterAid and Glastonbury Festival

The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts offers WaterAid a unique and innovative opportunity to publicise its overseas work - particularly sanitation.

Aside from the stunning array of established and emerging bands and performance artists, the media loves a good story about bodily functions and bogs!

The basic, yet practical, toilet facilities provided by the festival provoke a mixture of reactions but for the 2.5 billion people in the world without access to sanitation, lack of effective sanitation is more than a temporary inconvenience.

It is undignified and squalid and, combined with inadequate or non-existent supplies of safe water, is potentially a killer.

That's why WaterAid is so pleased to get the opportunity to spread the word to thousands of festival goers about the importance of clean water, safe sanitation, and hygiene education.

As well as giving us the chance to promote our work at the festival, the festival organiser Michael Eavis also generously donates a portion of the festival's proceeds to WaterAid.

Past festival highlights

For more great WaterAid at Glastonbury videos, visit WaterAid's YouTube site.

The donations received at the Glastonbury Festival are vitally important in helping prevent thousands of deaths from water-borne diseases in the countries WaterAid works in. A safe, clean water supply close to home and good sanitation brings huge benefits. In addition to ensuring people stay in good health, children no longer have to collect water for hours each day and have time to go to school, women have time to work and poor communities can begin to help themselves out of poverty.

For more information on what we do and the countries we work in please visit www.wateraid.org.

Registered charity no. 28870Registered charity numbers 288701 (England and Wales) and SC039479 (Scotland)