Donate your voice for World Water Day – and help spread the word!

Water, water everywhere…but not enough that’s clean, says a new WHO and UNICEF report released this week. As part of the Millennium Development Goals, the world aimed to halve by 2015 the population without access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation. The good news is that we met the drinking water goal back in 2010.

This week, we celebrate integration. Though it is intrinsically at the heart of what we and our partners do in addressing myriad global health challenges through thoughtful, efficient strategies, today integration is particularly at the fore. For the very first time, there is a global plan to simultaneously take on the two diseases killing more than 2 million young children each year: pneumonia and diarrhea.

The Integrated Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia and Diarrhoea (GAPPD), released last week by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, provides the latest strategies and evidence needed to reduce death and illness from the two leading killer diseases among children. Beyond integration across the two diseases, the GAPPD is an opportunity to meld global and local agendas, giving national governments a comprehensive tool to determine the specific plans, investments and partners needed to address the unique needs of their countries and achieve the greatest health impact for their citizens.

Early Saturday Morning, Nashville ONE Members (including my 11 year old granddaughter!) met downtown in Nashville to join Blood:Water Mission for their 3rd Annual Water Walk. The event gave participants the opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of the millions of women and children who walk miles to fetch water for their families every single day.

For World Water Day, March 22, ONE asked its members to donate their voices to raise awareness about the importance of water sustainability. The Chicago ONE Congressional District Leaders rose to the challenge by raising awareness at the Global Passport Youth Summit. The event was sponsored by Surge for Water, a US nonprofit organization that funds projects that provide access to safe water in developing regions.

To celebrate World Water Day we have a guest post from Jonny McKay of Excellent Development. Excellent Development support communities in Kenya to build Sand Dams which provide clean water for life and the opportunity to grow more food to eat, store and sell. For women in the world’s rural drylands, life is defined by the burden of collecting water. For the old and the young, the sick and the healthy, it is a chore with no relief.

As people of faith, and as cohabitants of this planet, the knowledge that millions of people go regularly without clean drinking water should set off the alarms in our conscience. When we read in Scripture about Jesus’ miracles, it’s not hard to conclude that God cares about human suffering. All but one of Christ’s miracles involved an element of compassion, and He makes it clear that His followers must do the same.

Today, one in eight people on the planet are undernourished.780 million people around the world lack access to clean water – that’s more than 2.5 times the population of the United States, and our current energy consumption rate of 13 trillion thermal watts, is straining the environment and depleting our energy resources. In a world of 7 billion, our resource scarcity has already reached unprecedented levels.

Lauren Pfeifer wrote up a great article outlining how programs like GAVI and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria have helped make progress on our poverty-fighting plan, the UN Millennium Development Goals, last week. Her article outlined the hard facts – but at the end of the day, we know that seeing

Last week, I answered frequently asked questions about the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – what they are, why they’re important, and what we want to see in the next round. This week, I want to focus on how the MDGs have sharpened efforts and accelerated progress toward meeting some of the world’s biggest development challenges.