Interested in water and sanitation issues? Mike McCamon from Water.org talks about how you can take action on World Water Day next week.
World Water Day is on March 22. To you, it may be just another day. But for teenager Haregeweyni Teklay, it’s a day for celebration and giving thanks.
Until the Water.org water project brought a well to her rural Ethiopian village, Haregeweyni spent two to three hours walking to the nearest river –- and carrying on her back -– the five gallons of water that would barely meet her family’s daily survival needs. Often, this water was contaminated. Today, she has clean water right by her home, better health, and more time for school.
Unfortunately, for every person like Haregeweyni who gains access to safe water, many millions continue to go without. You can help change this.
A coalition of nearly 25 nonprofits have come together to activate a social media awareness campaign starting Monday, March 21, in celebration of Water Day. It is a 100 percent online/viral campaign. You’re invited to “donate your voice” on either Twitter of Facebook to the water cause for one week. Starting Friday, March 18 and for one week, you’ll have one item posted each weekday to your account.
Signing up takes less than a minute and our collective voice will raise awareness for this most important issue. Visit http://water.org/waterday to sign up. You can disconnect your account at any time. Follow the #water2011 hashtag this week to see how it’s going http://waterday.org/reporting. Once you sign up, you can see all of the scheduled posts.
On behalf of the nearly one in eight people on earth who don’t have clean water, thank you. Your voice will help spur the awareness and action needed to bring this most basic necessity to those in need
This RainWater Bag could be a lower-cost and practical solution for mainstreaming rainwater harvesting.
This week, thousands of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) experts, and hundreds of members of the media came together in Stockholm for World Water Week to discuss solutions to the world WASH challenge.
David Trouba of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council suggested that “solving the sanitation crisis would be a more momentous accomplishment for humanity than the building of the Great Wall, the Apollo Moon Missions or the construction of the Pyramids.”
At present, the dire fact is that 1.2 billion people have to crap in the open — polluting drinking water and causing diarrheal-disease — while suffering the insecurity and indignity of open defecation. The consensus of the participants is that the world could, should and will solve this problem.
One of the specific outcomes of World Water Week was a statement targeted as a wake-up call for the High Level Plenary Meeting on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that will be held in less than two weeks.
Monday was World Water Day, but if you are still thirsty for more information on this critical issue, take a look at the Pulitzer Center’s online water gateway, DOWNSTREAM: Our Water, Our Lives.
This interactive site houses a wealth of information on water. Among many features, DOWNSTREAM examine water in terms of health, economics, conflict/cooperation, and climate. Each topic is analyzed and accompanied with reporting from around the world. You can share your story on water, meet the journalists, and watch video reports and clips from a World Water Day event in DC (including a speech by Secretary Hillary Clinton).
This compelling and informative site is produced by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Report, in partnership with PBS NewsHour, the Under-Told Stories Project, National Geographic, and the Common Language Project.
Last week, the WHO and UNICEF gave us what finally looked like a good news story. They released a report which showed that we are on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal on water—to halve the proportion of people without access to safe water by 2015.
But everything is not as rosy as it seems. While the global goal for water may well be met by 2015, many of the world’s poorest countries won’t have even reached this goal by 2050—unless efforts are scaled up. Sub-Saharan Africa in particular is a long way from clean water for all.
Perhaps even more worrying is that we are seriously off-track on the sanitation target—to halve the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015. Globally, 2.6 billion people are still without a safe place to go to the bathroom. The resulting diseases kill 4,000 children every day—more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.
At current rates, the MDG goal on sanitation won’t be met in sub-Saharan Africa for another 200 years. This gives sanitation the dubious honor of being the second most off-track MDG in the region, with only maternal mortality lagging behind.
Not only that, but the water and sanitation crises are also holding back improvements across lots of other areas—including education and maternal and child health. The lack of progress in water and sanitation is not only affecting human development, but also, crucially, economic growth. Why, then, do we hardly ever hear about it? There seems to be no political currency in championing toilets. Sanitation is literally a dirty word.
To prevent other development efforts from being undermined, WaterAid is calling on world leaders to take firm action and help reverse the global water and sanitation crisis. Ministers from developed and developing countries have the chance to do just that on April 23, as the first ever high-level meeting on water and sanitation takes place in Washington, DC.
The meeting will see the creation of a new global partnership to accelerate progress on water and sanitation—a global framework for action called ‘Sanitation and Water for All,’ similar to Education for All.
With the UN MDG Review Summit then in September, there is no better time for leaders, NGOs and the campaigning public to finally tackle this dirty issue.
-Mandy Folse, Head of Policy and Advocacy, WaterAid
Today some ONE staff got a chance to meet and chat with our friends from Water Advocates, and they brought a copy of April’s edition of National Geographic with them. For those who haven’t seen it yet, this month’s edition is entirely devoted to water. Pretty perfectly timed given Monday was World Water Day.
On top of this already pretty cool news, National Geographic is offering the entire magazine for free download on their website. This also includes some additional interactive content. One of the highlights in this edition is an article from Tina Rosenberg called “The Burden of Thirst” which chronicles Ethiopian women tasked with transporting water in the region.
Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton marked World Water Day with a speech at the National Geographic Society here in DC. It was a great speech that touched on some of the key benefits of advocating for clean water and sanitation in developing countries.
Below is a video and key excerpt (full text here):
The United States is making major investments to combat preventable diseases and improve child survival through our Global Health Initiative. Increasing access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene will help save lives that are now being lost to preventable diseases.
Seventy percent of the world’s water use is devoted to agriculture, and the outcome of our work to promote global food security depends in part on having a successful water policy and sound water management. Floods and droughts can wipe out crops, and decimate economies that depend on agriculture.
We are also working to empower women around the world, because depending upon which continent we’re talking about, the average is 60 percent of the farmers are women. In addition to that, women who gain access to sanitation, who are freed from the burden of walking for hours each day just to locate and carry water, will find it easier to invest time and energy in their families and communities.
The stability of young governments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other nations depends in part on their ability to provide their people with access to water and sanitation. A lack of water, sanitation, and irrigation we know leads to economic decline, and even can lead to unrest and instability.
Part of being serious about dealing with and adapting to climate change is about being serious about water. As the earth warms, rainfall patterns can shift, bringing new patterns of drought and flooding. And we need to get out in front of that problem.
Successful engagement on water can also affect how our country is perceived in the world. We spend a lot of time working on issues such as terrorism and arms control and nuclear proliferation. These are obviously important topics that deserve our attention. But the reality is that they are not problems most people deal with on a day-to-day basis. Water is different. When we demonstrate our concern for the issue, it speaks to individuals on a whole different level. Everyone knows sensation of thirst firsthand. We all have daily personal experience that we can think about and relate to, even if the nature and magnitude of that experience varies widely. Our ability to satisfy our need for water depends on our location and our circumstances. But as a matter of biological necessity, access to safe, sustainable supplies of water is a priority for everyone on the planet.
In the United States, water represents one of the great diplomatic and development opportunities of our time. It’s not every day you find an issue where effective diplomacy and development will allow you to save millions of lives, feed the hungry, empower women, advance our national security interests, protect the environment, and demonstrate to billions of people that the United States cares, cares about you and your welfare. Water is that issue.
Water. We all underestimate its importance. It’s so readily available in the developed world that we think of it almost like air. But polluted air often causes disease and illness. The same is the case for water. Billions of people across the world lack access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. One out of every five people does not have safe water to drink, and nearly one out of every two people does not have access to a decent toilet. Children are the most affected by these circumstances.
I witnessed this every day in my medical practice in Nigeria. As a physician in my community, I would see children suffering from varying degrees of dehydration, diarrheal disease, malaria, malnutrition—all kinds of illness. I would see the same families return to the clinic week after week. At that time, in the 1970s, it was very common to prescribe supplemental foods, such as formula, to help with recovery. But unless the formula was mixed with safe drinking water, the children remained sick.
Mothers would feed their children this supplemental formula, but they didn’t sanitize their equipment or boil their water. That water was often contaminated with pathogens and disease. No wonder there were so many cases of diarrheal disease, so many cases of infant mortality. It was a vicious cycle.
At PATH, we work all over the world in places of poverty. In these places, sanitation and water supply are comingled. When you don’t have running water, it’s very likely that you also won’t have sufficient garbage collection or human waste disposal. And because of the scarcity of water supply, families must store water at home. PATH has traditionally focused on developing and improving household water treatment and safe storage products, because if you can get the water clean, then you reduce the issues that arise from poor sanitation and water.
We also understand the need to enhance community-level water supplies and improve disposal and sanitation to keep disease away from the water supply. PATH believes in an integrated approach that combines these preventative measures with treatment to address diarrheal disease and other illnesses. This approach encourages country leaders to access all the tools at their disposal.
With the effects of global warming and changes in water patterns and droughts due to human activities, the world is more likely to fight over water resources in the future than anything else. There is no question that we’re in a precarious situation going forward. Availability of safe drinking water, especially for young children, will become increasingly important.
Solutions exist today, but a lot needs to be done in order to bring these solutions to the people who need them most. Many water and sanitation services in developing countries are subsidized, but they need to be made a priority so that everyone can afford them. In addition, health groups and water and sanitation groups need to work together to overcome traditional barriers. In the past, sectoral divides have led to missed opportunities to join forces to promote a common message: water and sanitation interventions are critical to human health, especially children’s health.
That’s why PATH is working together with a coalition of nearly 30 groups from the water, sanitation, hygiene, and health sectors to raise awareness about this crisis, on World Water Day and beyond. We need to encourage donors, policymakers, and advocates to support both simple, existing interventions and the development of new technologies so that everyone has access to safe water.
To help us spread the word, please view this video below and share it with your family and friends.
-Ayo Ajayi, vice president of Field Programs, PATH
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