Our story

Our story

How Frank Water began

In 1997, Katie Alcott travelled to India to teach in a school. She got seriously ill from drinking dirty water and returned to the UK to recover. Before she fell ill, she’d noticed that every day, different children came to school. Her class was never the same. Her colleague explained that children were often kept home to help their mothers collect water, or because they were ill – usually with diarrhoea from drinking contaminated water.

Fast forward to 2005 and Katie sets up Frank Water from her office in a cupboard under the stairs. Frank Water starts life as a social enterprise, selling bottled spring water to cafes and restaurants and donating the profits to an NGO in India to fund water projects.

Today, Frank Water is a registered charity and social enterprise. Frank Water Charity works overseas and in the UK. Since 2005, the charity has provided safe water, sanitation and good hygiene to 492,854 people in 711 communities in India and Nepal. In the UK, we work to educate and inspire people to change their behaviour and adopt a more sustainable approach to water.

Frank Water CIC (our social enterprise) delivers various commercial services that not only raise funds to support our charitable programmes but also reinforce our mission to inspire the UK (and beyond) to value and protect the world’s most precious resource.