Beyond the Pilot: What We Took From World Water Week 2026

Climate resilience is no longer a side conversation in the water sector. Instead, it's increasingly shaping how we think about water security itself. That was the thread running through the sessions our CEO, Jeny Wegbreit, joined at this year's World Water Week, where the conversation kept circling back to what it actually takes to build systems that hold up as conditions keep changing.

Jeny joined partners from the Stone Family Foundation, Saha Global, and The One Foundation for a panel on how funders can support organizations integrating climate resilience, drawing on a new brief from our consultant, Aguaconsult, Investing in Climate-Resilient WASH. A companion panel with Water For People, The Osprey Foundation, the WASH Funders Group, and Fundación Coca-Cola México picked up where that conversation left off, exploring how funders can influence the sector at large, beyond any single grantee relationship. 

We also co-hosted a session with Osprey and Aguaconsult introducing a new course that gives implementing organizations a flexible framework for building climate resilience into their operations and programming. The course launches on the IRC WASH Systems Academy website on September 14, 2026. 

A few ideas stuck with us. First, resilience is fundamentally a systems problem: the institutions, financing, and local capacity behind a project matter as much as the pipes and boreholes themselves. Second, the field needs fewer pilots and more pathways to scale, with government co-financing and blended finance turning promising models into lasting ones. Finally, philanthropy's real advantage is what it can risk: backing ideas before they're proven and giving organizations room to test, learn, and adapt. 

"It was a great reminder that philanthropy can be catalytic," Jeny said. "Not simply by funding individual projects, but by helping organizations test new ideas, learn what works, and build pathways to scale."

We left with new ideas and questions, and more conviction that this work is worth doing well.