A child dies every 15 seconds from diseases caused by a lack of safe water and sanitation, that's 1.5 million children dying from preventable diseases such as diarrhea, cholera and typhoid every year.
Water: A Global Perspective
Every day, millions of women and children in developing countries walk several hours a day to collect water that is safe for their families to drink, yet very often the water that they find is contaminated. Unclean water causes millions of people-especially young children-to contract preventable deadly diseases every year.
Human Development is more closely linked to access to water and sanitation than any other sector, including health, education, or access to energy. Investment in the provision of clean water yields an average economic return of $4.4 to $1 and investment in sanitation yields an average economic return of $9.1 to $1.
Exploitation of natural resources like water-the majority of which is caused by wealthier nations-has caused alarming devastation to the environment. The global water and sanitation crisis is mainly rooted in poverty, power and inequality, meaning the crisis is an issue of access rather than availability.
Today, one in eight people still do not have access to safe drinking water and more than half of the diseases in the world are caused by unclean water.
Over population, lack of hygiene and sanitation education and a lack of proper sanitation facilities all contribute to unclean water. Children who work to collect water for their families are sometimes denied an education, which, in turn, contributes to the cycle of poverty.
In developing countries, agriculture is by far the most important economic sector and critical in the production of food. However, according to UN-Water, an increasing number of regions suffer from chronic water shortages. Severe, frequent droughts and limited water resources have a drastic impact on a population's means of earning a living and producing food.
Read MoreUnited Nations Development Program (UNDP) | UN-Water Human Development Report 2006: Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis | UN Millennium Development Goals | www.water.org | www.worldwatercouncil.orgHow Concern is Meeting the Challenge
For more than 30 years, Concern has been working to improve access to clean, safe drinking water and sanitation. Our water and sanitation programs are a critical part of our strategy for alleviating poverty and hunger and improving health in the world's poorest countries.
Through our water programs we construct household and school latrines, stand pipes, boreholes, rainwater harvesting systems, rainwater cisterns, and rehabilitate and construct ground water wells and other water structures, in addition to protecting natural springs and fountains, and countering the effects of deforestation.
A key component of our work in water involves trainings among communities to managing and maintaining local water resources. Village buy-in and sustainability is key to the success of the water programs we implement, and Concern works to secure this through the set-up of Well Management Committees comprised of community volunteers who have been trained and equipped to manage and maintain their own local water resources.
Raising awareness of hygiene practices with communities ahead of well construction is a central part of our strategy to reduce disease. Concern is moving from a knowledge transfer approach to a social and behavior change approach with several of our programs using methods such as Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation (PHAST).
Concern's work in the construction of new or rehabilitated water structures significantly improves access to water for people in 15 countries and our initiatives in irrigation and erosion control lead to increased food production for thousands of those that we target each year.
- Pakistan. Concern distributed over 30 million liters of clean drinking water to flood-affected communities and built over 4,000 latrines and 3,700 hand pumps, benefiting 1,250,000 people during the period from July 2010 to 2011.
- Democratic Republic of Congo. Concern's water and sanitation program provided 40 villages with access to water, trained local water and hygiene committees to maintain the water systems, and completed hygiene training sessions reaching a total of 19,689 people
- Darfur, Sudan. Through the construction of household latrines and new and rehabilitated water structures, water access was significantly improved for more than 50,000 people in Abyei
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