In 2005, Congress passed the overwhelmingly bipartisan Water for the Poor Act, sending a strong signal to the Administration that both parties believe that water and sanitation for the poor is a strategic priority for US foreign policy. The Administration was to come back with a strategy within 180 days.

As we approach World Water Day on March 22, CARE, NRDC and WaterAid have published a report card on how well the Act has been implemented seven years down the line. The bad news is that a strategy has still not been released. The good news is that there are signals that it could be released soon. Leadership from Secretary Clinton and USAID Raj Shah has given new life to solving one of the world’s great crises.

In the absence of a strategy, USAID has gone ahead with water, sanitation and hygiene programs, but much of the effort and dollars have not gone to benefit the poor. Only 33 percent of USAID funding for water, sanitation and hygiene in fiscal year 2010 went to low income countries based on the most recent State Department report to Congress. International organizations and advocates would like to see that figure closer to 70 percent.

SEE ALSO: Water, sanitation and bipartisanship

Why doesn’t the money go to the poor? It’s a complex question, but at its heart is likely the tension between aid for geostrategic priorities and aid for the benefit of those in need. In this case, Congress was clear. The law states that priority countries should be those in which the need is greatest and where assistance will have the most impact.

In September 2010, the Government Accountability Office did an analysis of how aid for water, sanitation and hygiene was being targeted and found that the choice of high priority countries was “not linked to verifiable analysis.” In other words, USAID is likely responding to political and geostrategic priorities rather than need or expected impact. And this problem is only being compounded by the lack of a strategy to spur concerted targeting.

We can hope that the release of a strategy in the near future will resolve some of these issues. In the meantime, to obey the spirit of the law USAID should:

By taking these steps, USAID can ensure that US investments under the Water for the Poor Act are in fact benefiting the poor.

Note: ONE together with a coalition of over 40 organizations, is supporting Congressional co-sponsorship of the Water for the World Act, a bill that will strengthen implementation of the Water for the Poor Act and spur US leadership.

These days, it seems Americans have come to expect partisan stalemates in Washington, and foreign aid certainly hasn’t been immune. But a bipartisan group of congressmen, led by Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and Judge Ted Poe, R-Texas, has shown that there is still commitment to US leadership on global health and development.

This month, they introduced the Water for the World Act of 2012, a companion to the Senate version (championed by Senators Durbin, D-Ill., and Corker, R-Tenn., and reminded us that meeting basic human needs and saving lives is a fundamental value of Congress.

Safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) underpin many of our international health and development objectives. The most obvious contribution of WASH is to child survival: 4,000 children under five die each day due to diarrheal diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation. In fact, diarrheal disease is the number one killer of kids in sub-Saharan Africa, more than die from AIDS, tuberculosis or malaria.

WASH also has important impacts on other poverty-reduction and human rights goals, including:

So how does Water for the World help?

First, it builds off the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005, to improve coordination between WASH and other areas WASH can benefit, to make sure we’re getting the biggest bang for our buck.

Second, it enhances the targeting of existing investments in WASH, to make sure we’re reaching the poorest people.

Third, it helps preserve WASH as a bipartisan priority and a hallmark intervention of USAID.

Finally, the bill advances critical principles of aid effectiveness by improving monitoring, evaluation and transparent reporting, and supporting USAID’s ability to lead the work that is its mandate.

WASH has a return of $8 in saved health care costs and increased economic productivity for every $1 spent. And, a recent poll found that 61 percent of Americans believe safe water and sanitation should be a priority for the US government when assisting developing countries. That shows the public also realizes WASH makes good sense, not only on its own, but because it can help advance other objectives. Water for the World brings together common sense, US leadership, and members of Congress. This is an awfully good start.

You can show your support by tweeting about water, sanitation, and the importance of keeping all of foreign aid on the agenda, using the hash tag #Water4World.

When I was in Kenya this past July on the ONE Moms trip, I had quite a rude awakening when we traveled to rural areas -– a lack of toilets. There were not very many places for us to use the bathroom, unless we wanted to go in the bush or use one of the local latrines.

On the first day in Kisumu, in the western part of Kenya, I was forced to choose between using a latrine or waiting to get to a local hospital. Deciding I couldn’t wait, I walked to the latrine with a few of the other moms. Upon stepping in, I could barely breathe — the latrine smelled entirely of feces and urine and I absolutely could not overcome the smell to use the bathroom. Little did I know that it was one of the more sanitary latrines I would encounter during our time in rural Kenya. In Kibera, the lack of access to proper toilets was noticeable as well with bags of feces lining the streets. It’s no wonder cholera outbreaks are frequent.

It was then I realized something has to be done about sanitation in areas that desperately need it.

The lack of sanitary latrines in countries around the world is a serious problem and lack of sanitation claims the lives of thousands of people every year through connected diseases such as cholera and rotavirus, and parasites. It is vital to get this problem under control in order to save people from sickness and death.

November 19th is World Toilet Day; the goal of which is to spotlight how important it is to get sanitation under control. And while there is a lot to be done, there is good news.

Some universities with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are coming up with smart ways to manage sanitation issues in developing nations.

What is needed now? More investments in sanitation as well as smart ideas to solve the sanitation problem to ensure access to proper sanitation and improve ways countries discard waste.

I’ve seen it first hand. We are lucky to have indoor plumbing in our country.

One of the challenges facing peri-urban areas (areas just outside the city center where growing numbers of poor are settling) of Cochabamba, Bolivia is a growing population with little access to basic water and sanitation services. This results in diarrhea and other sickness and sometimes death.

The legal barrier is that many of the peri-urban areas are only marginally recognized by the government. This means that a water and sewage connection is probably many years away at best. In the meantime families have no choice but to purchase their water from water trucks, which is costly at $1 per barrel (26 gallons). Their toilet option is also undesirable: often the side of a wall or a nearby riverbed.

But there is at least one man in Cochabamba who is trying to change the water and sanitation situation for his family. Zenon Soliz is a contractor who lives with his wife, two children, sister and mother in District 9, peri-urban Cochabamba. District 9 is a dusty, hilly settlement and one of the poorest districts in the city. Only about half the households have a water connection and some type of toilet. Zenon is about to help improve that statistic.

About two months ago, Zenon met a man named David who runs a microenterprise in Cochabamba called SiSe, which markets and sells composting toilets. David showed Zenon a photo of the toilets he sells. Zenon, who was in the process of constructing a house for his mom and sister next door to his existing home, was already preparing to build a pit latrine toilet. “I liked the photo of the toilet David showed me,” says Zenon, “so I thought, why not construct the composting toilet instead?” He also liked the fact that the composting toilet can be connected to the sewage system. Another feature that helped in his decision was the water savings. He estimated that the pit latrine would use about half a barrel per month, so he would be saving money on water bills as well.

Zenon’s family house and toilet construction are well under way and he estimates that it will be completed within two months. He says he’s looking forward to the comfort of the new toilet and that his family will no longer have to use the riverbed.

One of the challenges of reaching higher coverage of sanitation in Cochabamba is the prohibitive cost of constructing a toilet, which can be around $700 to $1,000. For Zenon his family toilet is the equivalent of about three months’ wages, or about $850.

SiSe has been experimenting with sanitation loans as a way for families to access sanitation and pay the costs of their toilet over time. SiSe is also exploring options to lower the cost of toilet construction and increase toilet marketing efforts, such as the brochure, that influenced Zenon.

This is a long-term effort to be sure, and there are many barriers to overcome, but it is creative ideas like those that led to Zenon’s decision, that will take root and ultimately improve the lives of many more people.

John Sauer works for Water For People a nonprofit organization that partners in Bolivia with local government, communities, schools, civil society organizations, and local microenterprises, like SiSe, to reach high levels of water and sanitation coverage in targeted areas.

Imagine if you could be the spokesperson for your favorite nonprofit for a few moments. What would you say? How would you mobilize their audience to take action against the world’s injustices? What issues would you focus on?

Water.org, in partnership with Twitter, is giving one lucky person the opportunity to do just that. During the month of August, water and sanitation activists can enter their competition to take over — or “twakeover”– their Twitter handle, @water, for an entire week.

To become Water.org’s “Twee-EO,” you’ll need to tweet, Facebook update, email, Buzz, tumble, Google+ your heart out and get as many votes as possible on your profile page. During the week of September 5, the winner will be able to tweet, RT, mention anything they want to @water’s 400,000-plus Twitter followers — on the topic of water and sanitation, of course.

As ONE’s resident Twitter handler, I will be honest — tweeting for an organization is a whole lot of fun. But it’s also hard work, too. Making people care about our issues isn’t easy. As they say in Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Good luck!

Despite the taboo nature of this topic, we’re excited to see the momentum that is building around providing access to water and sanitation to the world’s poorest people and the great work many of our partners are doing on the ground. This week, USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures launched WASH for Life, a $17 million partnership to help scale new approaches for WASH services to developing countries. But, that’s not all. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is tackling the sanitation issue head on. Yesterday, they announced a $41.5 million donation into new program investments and new strategies.

Ironically, the Gates Foundation is using this money for toilets. Why are they spending money and time on toilets? Well, the toilet is an 18th century invention that reaches only one-third of the world’s population. This means that 2.6 billion people — meaning 40 percent of the world’s population — use unsafe toilets or openly defecate, resulting in many health complications and preventable deaths.

The Gates Foundation has a dynamic and forward-thinking approach — they want to reinvent this 18th century invention. To do this, The Gates Foundation’s Water Sanitation & Hygiene program collaborated with Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) in Global Health and challenged 22 universities to create a proposal for a technologically advanced toilet. The criteria for the toilets are pretty intense. Each toilet has to be hygienic, affordable, and independent from a sewage system.

Surprisingly, eight of these universities not only devised proposals that met the above criteria, they also used technological and scientific advances to make the toilets even more cutting edge. These proposed inventions even have the ability to transform waste into energy, clean water and nutrients. It’s pretty incredulous, but if you don’t believe me, check it out for yourself. The Gates Foundation has a list of the eight toilet proposals that were awarded grants. These proposals, which were devised by expert teams at leading universities, might shock you with their utility and capabilities!

While poop will never be a trendy issue, it is undeniably important. So, stay in the loop about ONE’s sanitation efforts and keep the dialogue going by sharing the video above and keeping up with the various efforts that are making water and sanitation more accessible in the developing world.

Just in the first quarter of this year, the country hosted more than 200,000 visitors, 60 percent of whom were non-Africans. And in 2010, tourists brought an estimated $200 million to the country, pulling the economy upward and creating jobs for Rwandans.

In order to keep these tourists coming (and keep the tourists happy), the government is reforming water and sanitation programs to ease visitors’ fears of contracting waterborne illnesses. In turn, Rwandan citizens will benefit, improving their quality of life and reducing the risk of preventable disease.

But what is most impressive is Rwanda’s sanitation efforts, which have improved by 58 percent — 8 percent higher than their original goal. This accomplishment was noted by Yolanda Coombes, World Bank’s Senior Sanitation and Hygiene specialist, who said that improved sanitation can increase tourist revenue receipts, as many potential visitors rightfully fear diarrhea. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who recently visited Rwanda, noted the country’s successes in overall development efforts.

Between Rwanda’s sanitation reforms and irresistible tourist attractions, it is clear the landlocked nation is on its way to becoming a landmark destination for African travels. If you’re planning on traveling any time soon, consider going to Rwanda. Not only will you have an incredible experience, you’ll help move the country into a brighter, more successful future.

Fighting poverty, supporting development and witnessing gorillas first hand — what more can one ask for from their next big vacation?

I never actually thought I would make it to Day 4 on just $1.50 a day, but here I am. For breakfast yesterday, I had oatmeal with brown sugar and a pat of margarine, rice with split pea “curry,” and instant ramen with frozen vegetables and an egg.

There was a point during the day where lovely little boxes of Harry & David’s treats (like chocolate-covered pretzels, butter cookies sandwiched with apricot jam and popcorn with heavenly bits of caramel and nuts) were presented to the office — but I took one look and knew the answer was “no.” I went to my desk and shoved a spoonful of brown sugar into my face before getting back to work.

There’s one thing that I actually haven’t mentioned to you about Live Below the Line’s challenge — we can drink all the water we want. It’s not part of our $1.50 a day allotment (although other drinks, like coffee unfortunately, are). Our policy intern, Jack Breslauer, pointed out that many people in the developing world — one billion, to be exact — don’t have access to safe water. And here I was calling my daily egg ration a luxury!

After doing a little more research, I was shocked to learn that people living in the slums often pay five to 10 times more per liter of water than wealthy people living in the same city. So, the poor are faced with an unfair choice: they can spend a big chunk of their wages on safe drinking water, or save that money for food and drink water from elsewhere. If it were up to me, I would ditch the clean water and take my chances at the local well — but of course, life for the world’s poorest people isn’t that easy.

Many sources for water are located miles and miles away and oftentimes polluted, and the burden of collecting water usually falls to women and children. In Africa alone, people spend 40 billion hours every year just walking for water. Jerry cans — the plastic bins they use to carry the water — weigh a whopping 40 pounds. Could you imagine a child having to carry that on their back? This might help:

Lastly, lack of access to safe drinking water is one of the major reasons why poor children get diarrhea, the second-leading cause of child death in the developing world. Diarrhea, which kills about 1.5 million kids each year, kills more young children than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. You’ve heard this all before — it’s why we’re asking people to sign our vaccines petition.

Poor parents would spend money on clean water if they could afford it or had better access to it. But they can’t and they don’t. And because of this, they’re putting their kids at risk of disease. It must be a terrible feeling, and I would not want to be in their position. As I sit here with a glass of filtered water, the only thing I have to fill me up before dinnertime, believe me when I tell you that I am grateful for it, and that those one billion people without access to clean water are on my mind.

Hat tip to charity: water, Water.org and my friend Becky for her food picture.

Check the ONE Blog tomorrow for updates on Day 5.

If I asked you to think about 384 million people, would you be able to find an image in your minds eye? If I tried to get you to visualize 147 million orphan children, would you be able to conjure up such a picture? In the swirl and confusion of conversations about the US economy and budget cuts, as we use the disembodied language of millions and billions of dollars, do you have a picture in your mind of a giant pile of bills and coins? Most of us will never see a trail of that many zeroes in our own bank accounts.

We do like big numbers. I have not heard anyone describe the trek to the summit of Kilimanjaro as a 3.8-mile climb. Climbers like to say that they traveled 19,340 ft.
What is fascinating to me is that even though the most common ways to describe issues of poverty is to use obtuse language and disconnected big numbers, if we think back to the reasons we began to care about the effects of poverty, it would, in most cases, start with a single story. The reasons we were compelled to write a letter to our senator, or sign a petition, or make a financial sacrifice was because of a single story. At some point in the conversation the numbers fell to the periphery and left standing a human face, or a family story that brought weight and meaning to what was once just information.

And so it is with great hesitation that I write this post. Because what I am hoping to celebrate without being contradictory is the completion of Blood:Water Mission’s goal to help bring clean water to 1,000 communities in Africa by way of a campaign called, “The 1000 Wells Project.” How could our widest eyes grasp a view vast enough to hold 1,000 communities? And even though it is impressive that nearly 700,000 people have access to clean, safe water that did not before, I understand that unless you were standing on the stage in Philadelphia during the Live8 concert, where nearly 1 million people gathered to bring mass awareness to the fight against global poverty, you might not be able to visualize such a physical presence.

So, to break it down, picture a small child roughly 6 years of age. Picture that child with a swollen belly from the worms about an inch in length that fill her bowels. Picture that child walking the 4 miles back to her village carrying a can of larva infested, animal polluted water that weighs as much as she does. Picture that girl dragging that water can nearly all day. Consider this child’s reality. She will not get an education because of this mundane task of collecting dirty water. She will not be healthy because she will carry worms in her system for the rest of her life. She will be embarrassed when the worms come out of her at random times because there are so many in her system even as the larva hatch inside of her and grow into more worms.

This reality is enough to make us shut down emotionally. Can you visualize yourself as a child? Or can you put your own child in that place under those conditions? Could you find the imagination necessary to feel those worms growing inside of you? Could you find your way to feel the hopelessness of never learning to read or write? Of course you can. But why would we want to stay in that meditation for too long? It is simply heartbreaking. Some might argue that feeling too much is no better than not feeling at all. As both experiences are numbing and paralyzing.

So, where do we go from here? What if we visualize that same child in a school classroom? What if we visualize her with soft skin, and no worms? What if we picture her holding a book that she is learning to read? Does that cause us to re-engage? Does it allow us a foothold back into a story that is ripe for our compassion empathy and action? This is the story we want to tell. It is the hope infused story of real people with real dreams and significant obstacles that they are overcoming. We do love those stories. We seek them out.

I have always held to an idea that if it were my family, and if it were my children who did not have the basic needs for human life, that our story would be compelling enough. I hope that it would not be necessary to wait for the creation of a movement of millions of people voicing solidarity and advocacy to make someone feel implicated in the story of my sick children alone.

After all, for those of us who have been invested in the work of fighting HIV/AIDS and the work of bringing clean water to communities in Africa, we aren’t invested in ending the water crisis. We are invested in helping people survive and thrive. Paul Farmer is absolutely correct. We do not treat a disease. We treat a person.

I have always loved ONE because it helps us find a foothold in the daunting language of humanitarian issues. It reminds us that our life story is compelling, even as our story is echoed and joined with other stories. Blood:Water Mission, in partnership with ONE, continues to have an effect on the story of ONE African becoming a hero in his or her own community. So, join us in celebrating the life of ONE healthy child, 700,000 times over. And thank you for your continued support!

-Dan Haseltine, Jars of Clay

Indian women now have something new to add to their list of requirements for potential suitors: A toilet. In fact, having a personal toilet has become so important that it can actually make or break a marriage. “No loo? No I do,” declare the women of Haryana, a rural state in northeast India.

This chant comes in protest to the 665 million people in India who do not have access to toilets — the largest number worldwide. This has caused a serious problem, especially for females. In a culture that places a premium upon modesty, women are forced to travel very far to find privacy or go before sunrise and after sunset when the men are asleep.

As one woman notes, “It’s inconvenient, undignified and, at night, it’s not safe.” Not to mention, open defecation also leads to bacteria entering water sources. Ingesting this contaminated water is a serious cause of illness, most notably diarrheal disease — one of the top two killers of children.

To address this problem, India’s Ministry of Rural Development launched the “No Toilet? No Bride!” initiative as part of their Total Sanitation Campaign. The Ministry hoped to end open defecation and improve sanitation by linking the importance of toilets to marriage. A societal preference for boys has caused males to outnumber females. Because of this unequal gender ratio, women can be more selective when choosing a potential husband. Using this new position of power, females are now demanding that their spouses install a basic toilet. The Ministry of Rural Development backs up this demand by offering monetary incentives to any individual that builds a toilet. As a result of these efforts, more than 1.71 million toilets have been built across Haryana — meaning 98 percent of households now have toilets!

Although huge strides have been made in northeast India, hygiene and sanitation still remains a problem for the rest of the developing world. UNDP estimates that nearly 2.4 billion people still do not have access to hygienic sanitation facilities. Because of this, an average of 5,000 children die every day due to water and sanitation related diseases. This death toll will surely worsen if the Senate votes to slash our foreign aid budget.

The WHO has shown that every dollar invested in water and sanitation yields an economic return between $3 to $34. Please sign the petition today to ensure that cost-effective interventions are not cut. Children should not be dying from something as pointless as not having a toilet.