A Nonprofit Engineering Team Puts AI to Work
charity: water operates with a mission that extends far beyond a single calendar date: helping the more than 700 million people worldwide who lack access to clean water. What sets the organization apart in the nonprofit space is its in-house engineering team, which builds and maintains the systems that underpin its operations. That technical capacity allows the organization to manage its own tools, ensuring they function properly and evolve to maximize their impact.
The team applies that mindset to what it calls "reinventing charity"—building a model grounded in trust, proof, and integrity. Every project is published on a map with GPS coordinates and photos, so donors can see precisely how their contributions are being used, even for work happening halfway around the world.
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.
AI Assistance in the Developer Workflow
GitHub has long been part of how the team collaborates and scales. The adoption of GitHub Copilot, however, changed their daily workflow in a fundamental way. Engineers now spend less time on boilerplate tasks and more time on business problems and work that requires creative human judgment.
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.
The team cites three reasons Copilot has been a gamechanger:
- Inline version of chat: The ability to tell the tool exactly what they want it to do, right in the editor, is a major convenience.
- Testing: Every developer on the team uses Copilot to write tests, helping them maintain 99% spec coverage.
- Suggestions and corrections: Less time spent looking up syntax or fixing trivial errors means more time for meaningful work.
GitHub Copilot helps us code about 10% faster, which across a team of 8, is extremely effective.
The team also relies on open source libraries, recognizing that developers are rarely solving a truly unique problem. That approach lets this small team punch above its weight.
Collaborating with the open source community is almost the same as collaborating with our own teammates.
Commitment Beyond Code
GitHub and Microsoft have supported charity: water and similar organizations as part of a broader sustainability commitment. That includes a goal to replenish more water than they consume by 2030, with investments in land conservation, aquatic habitat restoration, water supply reliability, and water quality projects.
