World Water Day: how GitHub Copilot is helping bring clean water to communities

March 22 is World Water Day—a day intended to educate, inspire, and promote action around the importance of clean and safe water. For organizations like charity: water, this is their mission year-round. They’re working to help the more than 700 million people worldwide who don’t have access to clean water, and they’re finding innovative ways of using technology to do it.

We’ve seen entire communities transformed with access to clean water and the impact that brings, like the ability to grow your own food and start a small community business. These things really start to accelerate once people are not spending their time retrieving clean water.

- Christa Stelzmuller, chief technology officer at charity: water

How tech is changing the tide of the water crisis

What else makes charity: water’s approach unique? They have an in-house engineering team, making them an innovator in the nonprofit space. This enables them to manage their own systems, ensuring they function correctly and evolve to have the greatest impact on their mission. Their developers are dedicated to changing the tide of the water crisis, and they know how impactful their work can be.

And they have used this innovative mindset to help them do what they call “reinventing charity.” They want to create a space based on trust, proof, and integrity that makes donors feel connected to something that’s happening half a world away. They’ve done this by putting every single project onto a map with GPS coordinates and photos. Now, everyone who gives can see exactly how they’re making a difference.

The impact of GitHub Copilot on their mission

GitHub is an integral part of how their team collaborates and scales, but the adoption of GitHub Copilot has completely changed their workflow. Now, engineers can spend more time focused on solving business problems and doing things that require creative human thought.

Copilot is like a magical autocomplete, it lets us focus more on what is the actual challenge we’re trying to solve, rather than worrying about the syntax.

- Jasdeep Gosal, director of engineering at charity: water

Here are their top three reasons why GitHub Copilot has been a gamechanger:

1. Inline version of chat: they love the ease of telling it exactly what they want it to do
2. Testing: every person on the team uses it to test, helping them keep 99% spec coverage
3. Suggestions and corrections: they’re able to spend less time looking up syntax and correcting trivial errors

GitHub Copilot helps us code about 10% faster, which across a team of 8, is extremely effective.

- Jasdeep Gosal, director of engineering at charity: water

Another thing that helps this small but mighty team to get the job done is relying on the power of open source. They know that developers are rarely solving a truly unique problem, which is where open source libraries come into their workflow.

Collaborating with the open source community is almost the same as collaborating with our own teammates.

- Jasdeep Gosal, director of engineering at charity: water

From simplifying the workflow of a developer to having an impact on the global water crisis, technology and AI are reshaping the way we work. Dive into a better way of working by trying GitHub Copilot for free today, or if you are a nonprofit organization, check out GitHub for Nonprofits for exclusive discounts.

GitHub and Microsoft are committed to charity: water’s work, which is why we have supported them, along with many other organizations, to help further their missions. We are dedicated to achieving our goal of replenishing more water than we consume by 2030, and invest in projects focused on land conservation, aquatic habitat restoration, water supply reliability, and water quality. Learn more about Microsoft’s Sustainability goals.