Stella Artois and Matt Damon pool resources

Stella Artois, the premium brand of Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev, launched the Buy a Lady a Drink campaign for the first time in China to bring clean water to women in Wenshan Zhuang and Miao autonomous prefecture of Southwest China's Yunnan province.

Buy a Lady a Drink is a global public welfare project launched in 2015 by Stella Artois and its co-partners, Hollywood actor Matt Damon and United States-based charity organization Water.org.

It aims to help women and families to solve difficulties in using clean water.

The campaign, which has now come to China, aims to drive awareness of the global water crisis that affects 663 million people around the world who lack access to clean water. It calls on consumers to help leave a legacy as the generation that ends the crisis, once and for all.

In the countries where it has operated, the Buy a Lady a Drink campaign cooperates with the well-known local artists to sell limited-edition chalices, or drinking cups, featuring their special designs.

For every limited-edition chalice sold, Stella Artois helps Water.org provide five years of clean water for one needy person in the impoverished regions.

Stella Artois debuted with the project in China at the international design show - Design Shanghai.

"As a global campaign of Stella Artois, Buy a Lady a Drink has always been concerned about women's domestic water use in developing countries and by allying with the consumers, committed to making a difference to the survival of women," said Frank Wang, vice-president of legal and corporate affairs, AB InBev north Asia-Pacific region.

At the design show, a special chalice carousel was formed, three meters high and consisting of 180 of the limited-edition chalices. The chalices, created by designer Cathy Wang, featured depictions of the Miao ethnic group of Wenshan.

The chalices will also go further afield in China, with another 5,000 limited drinking cups being put up for sale on Tmall.com. By purchasing one, people can jointly participate in the five-year water plan for women in Wenshan, buying them a drink.

Before coming to China, the Buy a Lady a Drink campaign operated in India, Ethiopia, Honduras, Haiti, Kenya and Peru, bringing clean water and also creating employment opportunities.

In 2017, Stella Artois began focusing on China and selected Yudemi village in Wenshan - which suffers from extreme scarcity of water resources due to environmental and geological conditions - as the first stop for its campaign.

With the support of the local government and residents, Stella Artois built a reservoir and laid pipes to bring clean water to households.

The partners are hoping that with the project moving to China, Buy a Lady a Drink has taken another solid step towards its objective of aiding 3.5 million women gain access to clean drinking water in a long-term and sustainable way by 2020.

AB InBev's Wang said the initiative was a corporate social responsibility campaign helping to link people, for a better world.

"We will continue to support this charitable campaign because it solves water problems for Chinese women," Wang added.

Li Guoxiang, deputy director of the Rural Development Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said organizing such campaigns attracted the favorable attention of people from international companies partnering with international organizations - to create a better quality of life for those in the country's remote areas.

zhongnan@chinadaily.com.cn