Optimizing Impact

Supporting clean water and sanitation development programs, organizations enhance their long-term impact for most other humanitarian aid initiatives; health improves for all populations, food grows, women and children's education increases, and jobs are created. Particular to Kenya, mass starvation could be eradicated and people depending on aid to survive could become self-reliant!

Why Water?

Freshwater is essential to daily life for women, men, children, livestock and most land-based ecosystems.  The implications of access to clean water extend beyond the crucial role of providing the food and hydration that every person needs: water and sanitation-related causes contribute to almost 10,000 deaths every day, worldwide.1 Diarrhea alone from unclean water and poor sanitation results in 4,000 children’s deaths every day.2 This is an entirely preventable public health crisis.  Water available only at large distances forces women throughout the world to exhaust their time collecting it, preventing them from mothering, teaching, learning, or working; with mothers stuck carrying water, children cannot attend school as they are needed at home to care for younger siblings.  Water sources carelessly diverted or depleted result in starvation, conflict, and even war.3 From improving literacy, to empowering women, to saving lives, access to clean water can dramatically advance every aspect of a developing nation’s progress.

The United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) state that “overcoming water resource and management issues is essential to eradicating poverty.”4 Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute and developer of the Millennium Development program, has boldly stated that solving the issue of safe water is the easiest of all the MDGs to accomplish!5

1Pruss-Ustun, Annette; Bos, Robert; Gore, Fiona; and Jamie Barton. 2008. “Safer Water, Better Health: Costs, benefits and sustainability of interventions to protect and promote health,” World Health Organization, p. 12.

2WHO/WaterAid Statistics – “A Global Crisis.”  Accessed online 3/15/2011 at http://www.wateraid.org/international/what_we_do/statistics/default.asp.

3Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2008. “Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet,” The Penguin Press, p. 129

4United Nations. “Water for the Millennium Development Goals: Why managing water resources wisely is key to achieving the MDGs,” United Nations World Water Assessment Programme. Accessed online 3/15/2011 at http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/publications/WWAP_Water_and_MDGs.pdf.

5Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2008. “Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet,” The Penguin Press, p. 131.

 

Comments are closed.



Go To Top »