 Water…We need it to live. We take it for granted. Yet millions of children don’t even have clean water to drink. Each minute, six children somewhere in the world die from diseases they catch from drinking unpurified water.
Earth is called the Blue Planet because water covers so much of its surface—three quarters of the earth is water. But 97 percent is salty and 2 percent is locked up in ice.
Which means there is only 1 percent left for people, plants and animals, and this is quickly disappearing or being polluted. In countries where clean water does not reach everyone—and there are many of them—it is the poor who suffer the most.
More than 1 billion poor people, mostly in remote rural areas do not have access to clean, fresh water. Women and children in these areas often have to walk for hours to collect and carry home enough water to meet their basic daily needs. Those poor people who live in city slums usually have to pay for water that is carried in by trucks. They often pay much more for the water they drink than the wealthier people who have water piped to their houses in the same cities. Nearly 3 billion people live without any sanitation.
There is more to this issue than a lot of thirsty people. Lack of clean water and proper sanitation causes illness and bad nutrition. When children are sick or malnourished, they can't go to school to improve their lives. When there is not enough water, there is no way to irrigate crops, and so there is less food to eat or to sell for a living. When there is no water, there is no way to generate power to create electricity and run industries. Sometimes a shortage of water can cause conflict between countries that share water sources.
Not only do the poor suffer the most from lack of water, but lack of water creates poverty and suffering. Finding ways to protect our fresh water resources and get water to those who lack it is extremely important.
There are a couple of ways of how to bring safe water and sanitation to the entire world. One way is to provide funding directly to remote communities so that they can create their own safe water systems. Another way is to help governments manage their natural water resources without harming the environment, and to support the development of new solutions for delivering more water to more people in a sustainable way.
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