In accordance with the statutes, the long-standing chair of the board Henner Lang moved to the Board of Trustees of the WaterFoundation for reasons of age at the end of April 2020. Since May 2020, the new chairwoman of the board of directors is the previous deputy chairwoman, Dr Beate Grotehans.
Henner Lang, who studied business administration, founded the WaterFoundation together with Ernst Frost exactly 20 years ago. With great personal commitment, resourceful ideas, untiring patience and never-ending energy, Henner Lang and Ernst Frost, who for private reasons had already joined the Board of Trustees two years ago, have, with the help of a growing team, made the Foundation what it is today: a small but very powerful institution committed to implementing the human right to water.
From the very beginning, Henner Lang not only took care of the foundation’s commercial affairs and collected donations at numerous lecture events, but also initiated and implemented a large number of projects himself, especially in Ethiopia. He carried out many of the small and large water supply projects together with the cooperation partner in Ethiopia, the engineer Fekadu Aleka. “The many years of intensive cooperation have long since developed into a close friendship,” says Henner Lang. He is convinced that this mutual trust is a key prerequisite for development cooperation to be fruitful and to function sustainably: “Small organisations like our WaterFoundation have a clear advantage here. Henner Lang will continue to do his utmost to support the interests of the people in Ethiopia even after his move to the Foundation Board.
With Beate Grotehans, an experienced woman from the foundation is taking over. She has been involved in the WaterFoundation since 2012 – first as a project developer, later as deputy chairwoman. She gained her expertise, among other things, as Senior Project Manager at the Siemens Foundation, where she was responsible for major research projects in the field of development cooperation and social entrepreneurship. Her deputy will be Robert Balthasar, the former Chief Financial Officer of the WaterFoundation.
You can find more information about the people who work for the WaterFoundation here.