From Households to Schools: The Growing Impact of Nazava Water Filters
- Cecilia Hough
- Mar 26
- 5 min read
For the 4.4 billion people around the world who don’t have access to treated water at home, getting safe drinking water can be time-consuming and costly. Nazava Water Filters help households, and especially women in the households, purify their water without the need for boiling or electricity. By making clean water simple and affordable, Nazava enables families to improve their health, save money and time, and reduce both plastic waste and CO₂ emissions.
We are delighted to shine a spotlight on the impactful work of Nazava Water Filters and explore how B Corp certification and collaboration are helping the company expand its reach. In this interview, Lieselotte Heederik (Lisa), Co-Founder and Director of Nazava Water Filters, shares her insights with B Lab Singapore.
At your core, what kind of positive change are you trying to create through your work?
We believe that everyone, everywhere, should have access to safe and affordable drinking water. However, women often carry the greatest burden and cost of providing clean water for their families. That’s why we focus on empowering women to purify their own water, whether it comes from taps, rivers, rain, or wells, and make it safe to drink. By 2030, we aim to reach 4 million people with daily access to safe and affordable drinking water.
How does being a B Corp impact your work?
Being a B Corp means we are part of a global movement of like-minded enterprises that share the same standards and motivation to do good for both people and the planet.
When we founded Nazava Water Filters, our mission and operations were already closely aligned with B Corp principles, so pursuing certification felt like a natural step to validate that commitment. Today, being part of the B Corp movement helps make our impact goals more explicit and recognisable to the wider community.
The certification process has also increased our awareness of how our work affects the environment and our employees. As a result, we have set higher standards for energy efficiency and employee engagement, while also identifying areas where we can improve further, for example, within our supply chain. View Nazava’s B Corp Profile.
Water filters at home reduce the strain on women to boil water, often over wood-burning fires, to provide their families with safe water.
Collaboration & Community: How does collaboration support your impact?
Collaboration plays an important role in helping us extend our reach and deepen our impact. By working with partners who share similar goals, we are able to bring safe and affordable drinking water to more communities than we could on our own.
Through these partnerships, we combine complementary strengths, from community outreach and education to distribution and local implementation. This helps ensure that households not only gain access to water filters but also understand how to use and maintain them effectively.
Being part of the B Corp movement also creates opportunities to connect with other mission-driven businesses. These relationships allow us to exchange knowledge, learn from each other’s experiences, and explore new ways to scale our impact. For Nazava, this community helps accelerate progress toward our goal of making safe drinking water accessible to more people.
During a campaign to support flood victims in Sumatra at the end of 2025, several B Corps, NGOs, and business partners contributed donations to help us provide water filters to affected households. As soon as we understood the scale and devastation of the floods, we launched a crowdfunding campaign and reached out to partners via WhatsApp, social media, and LinkedIn. Supporters could contribute by funding a specific number of filters, which we then shipped to our local partner, the Haka Foundation, for distribution to the communities they serve. Organisations that wished to support a particular community could also purchase filters at a discounted rate, which we shipped directly to their chosen location. We were also encouraged by the involvement of several universities, which purchased filters and managed their own distributions. Particularly heartwarming were the contributions from individuals across Indonesia, some of whom even brought bags of rice and packages of Indomie to our office to be sent to Aceh.
With all this support, we were able to distribute more than 7,000 water filters to flood-affected communities, enabling around 35,000 people to purify flood water and make it safe to drink.
We have also received support from fellow B Corps in other ways. For example, one B Corp carried out a complimentary audit of our online presence, which was incredibly valuable. In addition, the podcast by Make the Change featuring our company has helped us share our mission with a wider audience.
These experiences highlight how much stronger organisations can be when they support each other. By sharing expertise, resources, and networks, and by simply asking within our communities when collective action is needed, we can unlock support that might otherwise remain untapped. In doing so, we amplify each other’s efforts and ultimately increase the positive impact we create.
How do you see the real-world impact of your work on people, communities, or the environment?
To date, Nazava Water Filters has provided access to safe drinking water to more than 1 million people. Of these, 78% live on less than $8 per day, and around 80% are women.
Beyond improving access to safe water, our solutions also create broader social and environmental benefits. By replacing the need to boil water, we have helped reduce approximately 385 tonnes of CO₂ emissions. Our filters have also saved women an estimated 11.6 million hours that would otherwise be spent collecting fuel or boiling water, while enabling households to save about $24.5 million by choosing a more affordable drinking water solution.
In addition, we have helped provide safe drinking water to more than 1,000 schools across Indonesia and Kenya.
Our work is far from done. As climate change intensifies, water resources are becoming both scarcer and more polluted. Natural disasters and blackouts can also disrupt access to safe water, making resilient, household-level solutions increasingly important.
For companies or organisations that are inspired by your work, how can they get involved or collaborate with you?
We are always looking to build partnerships with organisations that share our mission. For example, during large-scale disasters, like the recent floods in Sumatra, we collaborate with partners to provide water filters to affected communities.
We also run a school programme in eastern Indonesia. Many schools in Indonesia do not provide drinking water to their students, even though there is strong evidence that proper hydration plays an important role in students’ health and academic performance. Companies and organisations interested in supporting this mission can partner with us to help equip schools with water filters.
Companies can also provide filters in their own offices and factories, ensuring that they are prepared for emergencies while reducing reliance on bottled water in the workplace.
Those interested in collaborating are welcome to reach out to Lisa to explore partnership opportunities.
Email Lisa at Lisa@nazava.com
Follow Nazava Water Filters on LinkedIn
At B Lab Singapore, we are building a movement of aligned and grounded business leaders who pursue purpose alongside progress. We are grateful to Nazava Water Filters and Lisa for sharing her insights with the B Lab Singapore team. We are constantly energised by the trailblazers in our movement who are redefining what business success looks like and pushing the boundaries of what “good” can become.
If the above spoke to you, and you are part of a business that places impact at the heart of what you do, get in touch with us to be part of the B Corp community! Connect with us, subscribe to our newsletter, and attend our upcoming events.
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