Through this partnership, the French Red Cross has the benefit of a durable system of volunteering skills that can be called on in crisis periods, along with equipment that provides rapid access to safe water. However, these same skills can also be made available during non-emergency periods when a lack of safe water requires specific expertise.
Over the past 14 years, 80 volunteers from the Veolia Environnement Foundation have left on missions with the Red Cross, assisted in France by a similar number of volunteers providing logistics support. The time volunteered adds up to 1,700 days on the ground during 23 missions. These include Haiti where, just after the earthquake that took place on January 12, 2010, the French Red Cross was one of the main suppliers of drinking water at assembly points in the capital Port-au-Prince. At 66 sites, water reserves and distribution bars were installed to provide a daily supply to some 180,000 people. The Veolia Environnement
Foundation continues to provide its expertise and financial aid in Haiti through the project to improve the water supply network in Petit-Goâve, the former capital, which was badly damaged by the earthquake.
In similar fashion, in 2008, following a first emergency intervention in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital that was badly hit by cholera, the Veolia Environnement Foundation then provided support to the French Red Cross for two years in a wide-reaching program to rehabilitate the country's main water production plants.