It was my great honour yesterday to walk with Dutch schoolchildren, who were raising awareness of global water issues and raising hard cash to fund water and sanitation projects through Akvo.

I was with Luuk in Eindhoven, home of Philips (and the compact disc!). Peter and Kathelyne were at Katwijk, on the Dutch coast. Mark Westra was in the Eastern city of Arnhem.

We’ve described the format of Walking for Water already, and the organisations behind it (it’s led by Aqua for All). It’s a concept that Live Earth is now helping us extend globally.

You can see the projects that the kids were funding here on the Walking for Water Project page, in Akvo.

Spending time with kids always fascinates me — they’re clear cut, unladen with the sentimentality that adults have towards poverty and development. They’re not interested in symbolism and really can’t be fed propaganda like adult campaigners can — they’ll do it their way. Luuk and I had huge fun walking with the 35-strong Eindhoven Internationale School, led by the wonderful Fiona Knol. One of nine schools on the Eindhoven walk, her kids were great — they’d raised more than €1,500. This was to be tripled by corporate and institutional funders. Overall, the Eindhoven event alone raised more than €25,000.

On Thursday night, it was announced that the Dutch walks were on track to raise €1.2 million ($1.6 million) in total. We’ll do a wrap-up blog to set out what was raised where, next week, along with further interviews with people involved, to help organisers elsewhere in the world harness this really powerful, really fun way to educate kids and raise money for water and sanitation projects.

Mark Charmer is co-founder of Akvo.