How Our Network Platform Works

We created the Peer Water Exchange (PWX) as a participatory decision-making system to select, fund, manage, monitor, and share grassroots water and sanitation projects worldwide efficiently, effectively, and transparently. PWX is an on-line application, concieved and created before the phrase "Web 2.0" was in use!

In addition to being the only scalable, map-driven, and completely open platform in the water sector, PWX is also the only participatory decision-making system where applicants get to weigh in funding decisions. PWX combines people, process, and technology to manage thousands of WASH projects around the world - from application, selection, funding, implementation, to impact assessment. PWX helps competitors become collaborators, making them work together, learn, and share, thus helping create the impact we desire. Visit the PWX Site >>

Peer Water Exchange Features and Functionality

The features built into the Peer Water Exchange application add enormous value to all members:

Be Sponsored To Join
All prospective NGO members must be sponsored by a member of the Network. This sponsor guides the prospect’s peer review by other members and helps them become familiar with how the Network operates and the resources available to them. They also introduce them to other members with similar interests.

Simple Online Application For Funding
A simple application involves no formatting and allows for uploading spreadsheets, documents, photos, and videos. This dramatically reduces application time and allows implementers to focus on their projects.

Peer Review
Using peer reviews to select projects for funding approval strengthens proposals and shares new approaches across the network. Peer review is not to just accept or reject but to help, guide and improve the quality of projects. Anyone can view proposal content, cost, peer review comments and final ratings.  An interactive map makes it easy to access this information and to search on a wide variety of criteria.

Open, Networked Decision Making
Peer review makes for streamlined decisions and ensures the highest potential projects are the ones approved for funding. This process has been proven over four years and has distributed nearly $1.5 million of funding efficiently, with successful results.

Easy and Powerful Reporting
It is easy to put up short status reports with photos, videos and commentary to show progress to agency headquarters, funders, and the public. Each project contains its entire history of what happened and what was learned.

Long-term Impact Assessment
Any visitor to a project, even the villagers themselves, can post a report of how the project is working and how it has affected community life, even years after project completion. This helps sustain the project while delivering long-term impact assessment at minimal cost.

Transparency of Project Data and Learning
Anyone, from funders to NGO’s to the public, can see what was supposed to happen with a project, what actually happened and lessons learned. This creates accountability, while leveraging learning across the Network to improve the capacity of all.

Innovative Maps and Visualization
The Network provided the first interactive map in the water sector showing all members, proposals and projects, as well as their status and peer review connections. This continues to be developed with many innovative mapping features that cover all aspects of funding, project management and monitoring.  Being able to drill down on the map to the actual location of a project or to see which members peer reviewed a proposal takes the information from “data” to “real life”.  Funders also are able to have a single view of all of their projects on the Network, as well as other similar proposals they might be interested in funding.

Contextual Search, Project Management and Donor Communications
The Network is becoming the world’s largest and most active database of water projects. Our members have entrusted us with the management of over $25 million of their water and sanitation projects.  This strengthens their internal project management and external donor communication while increasing the pool of data available for public learning. The knowledge base is kept fresh and alive thru a stream of updated reports. Our search function is powerful and contextual, allowing searching across multiple criteria in different parts of the process. The map of search results provides a unique and powerful visual impact.