WATER

Water Projects: What your money buys

Below are some examples of what your money could buy.

• £180 could pay for a Hand Pump in Pakistan for households and local schools
• £200 could pay a mason to build a hand-dug well in Africa
• £35 can enable one person to access safe water, improved hygiene and sanitation
• £250 could pay to train two community members to maintain their village water supplies
• £200 could contribute towards a Water Bore project in Asia/Africa
• £200 could buy a locally built rope pump in Africa

Water Irrigation & Sanitation

Water is a basic need of all human beings, without which people cannot survive.

It is shocking to hear in this modern era of technology and excess material resources that there are millions still without water.

It is our collective duty to work tirelessly to provide the source of life to all human beings everywhere.

We are regularly providing mechanisms and building infrastructures within communities, along with our partners, to provide a system of water irrigantion for domestic, agricultural and industrial usage.

Please join us in this work.

What is the problem?

There is a global crisis in water and sanitation

There is a global crisis in water and sanitation. Billions of people live in the kind of squalor and disease that was eradicated long ago in the rich world.

Without sanitation and water there can be no sustainable development in health, education and livelihoods, locking people into a cycle of poverty and disease.

This crisis is one of inequality and poverty. If it is not tackled decisively, it will prevent and undermine progress made in reducing poverty, in achieving universal primary education, and improving people’s basic health.

End Water Poverty aims to change policy and practices according to these key principles:

• Equity – by targeting services at the most marginalised groups, such as older people, the poor, disabled people and women
• Poverty reduction
• Sustainability of services and water resources
• Accountability, so that key decision-makers are held to account by the poor through transparent and open planning processes

How are poor people in developing countries affected by this crisis?

• 884 million lack access to clean water
• 2.5 billion lack access to basic sanitation

It is a crisis that is killing as many as 5000 children a day – the equivalent of 20 airliners filled with children lost everyday to an entirely preventable public health crisis.

It is a crisis driven by inequality and poverty, where the burden falls most heavily on women. It is girls who are denied an education because they are tasked with fetching water or drop out of school in adolescence because of inadequate sanitation facilities. And as adults, women continue to waste hours each day in the search for water and inevitably look after the children that are ill or dying from diarrhoeal diseases.

It is a crisis that hampers economic growth and income generation

In Africa, an estimated 5% of GDP is lost to illnesses and deaths caused by dirty water and the absence of sanitation.

What effect does climate change have on this crisis?

In the coming years, climate change is expected to put increased pressure on water resources. Where water and sanitation services are poorly managed, the effects of climate change are going to make matters much worse. Unless water resources are protected and shared equitably, poor and marginalised communities will suffer most.

What are governments doing about this crisis?

Water and sanitation are services that the poor almost always put as one of their top three priorities. However, the international development community and developing country governments treat them predominantly as marginal issues. The volume of spending on the sector has remained largely stagnant over the last ten years, and it has actually fallen in terms of the relative increases in overall aid spending and spending on health and education.

Put simply, the water and sanitation sector is in crisis because there is a lack of political will to push through changes that benefit the poorest and most vulnerable people.

Background

A global crisis

• 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe water. This is roughly one in eight of the world’s population. (WHO/UNICEF)
• 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, this is almost two fifths of the world’s population. (WHO/UNICEF)
• 1.4 million children die every year from diarrhoea caused by unclean water and poor sanitation – 4,000 child deaths a day or one child every 20 seconds. This equates to 160 infant school classrooms lost every single day to an entirely preventable public health crisis. (WHO/WaterAid)

Sanitation

• 7 out of 10 people without sanitation live in rural areas. (WHO/UNICEF)
• Diarrhoea kills more children every year than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. (WHO)
• Children living in households with no toilet are twice as likely to get diarrhoea as those with a toilet. (WEDC)
• Every year, around 60 million children in the developing world are born into households without access to sanitation. (UN Water)
• One gram of human faeces can contain 10,000,000 viruses, 1,000,000 bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, 100 parasite eggs. (UNICEF)
• At any one time half the hospital beds in developing countries are filled with people suffering from diarrhoea. (UNDP)

Hygiene

• Hand-washing with soap at critical times can reduce the incidence of diarrhoea by up to 47%. (UN Water)
• The integrated approach of providing water, sanitation and hygiene reduces the number of deaths caused by diarrhoeal diseases by an average of 65%. (WHO)

Water

• 8 out of 10 people without safe water live in rural areas. (WHO/UNICEF)
• The weight of water that women in Africa and Asia carry on their heads is commonly 20kg, the same as the average UK airport luggage allowance. (HDR)
• The average person in the developing world uses 10 litres of water every day for their drinking, washing and cooking. (WSSCC)
• The average European uses 200 litres of water every day for their drinking, washing and cooking. North Americans use 400 litres. (HDR)
• On current trends over the next 20 years humans will use 40% more water than they do now. (UNEP)
• Agriculture accounts for over 80% of the world’s water consumption. (UNEP)
• 97.5% of the earth’s water is saltwater. If the world’s water fitted into a bucket, only one teaspoonful would be drinkable. (HDR)

Education and livelihoods

• For every $1 invested in water and sanitation, $8 is returned in increased productivity. (UNDP)
• Lack of safe water and sanitation costs sub-Saharan Africa around 5% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) each year. (UNDP)
• 443 million school days are lost each year due to water-related diseases.
• 11% more girls attend school when sanitation is available. (UK DFID)

Millennium Development Goals

• The world is on track to meet or even exceed the MDG for safe drinking water – to halve the proportion of people without access to safe water by 2015. However, even though we are on-track globally, 884 million people are still without access. (WHO/UNICEF)
• The world is seriously off-track to meet the sanitation MDG target – to halve the proportion of people without access to sanitation by 2015. If current rates of progress continue, the global sanitation goal will be met 30 years too late. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the sanitation target in that region is not due to be met for another 200 years. (WHO/UNICEF)
• Nearly half the people who gained access to water between 1990 and 2008 live in India and China. (WHO/UNICEF)

Financing the sector

• Over the past 10 years, aid to health and HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa has increased by nearly 500%, while aid to water and sanitation has increased by only 79%. (OECD)

Water and sanitation in history

• South Korea made huge investments in water and sanitation during the 1960s, when its per capita income was the same as Ghana’s, and during that decade, under-five mortality more than halved, while the number of medical staff stayed virtually the same. (WaterAid)
• In the UK the expansion of water and sanitation infrastructure in the 1880s contributed to a 15 year increase in life expectancy in the following four decades. (HDR, 2006)

Abbreviations used

• DFID – UK Department for International Development
• HDR – UN Human Development Report
• OECD – Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
• UNDP – United Nations Development Programme
• UNEP – United National Environment Programme
• UNICEF – United Nations Children’s Fund
• WEDC – Water Engineering Department, University of Loughborough
• WHO – World Health Organization
• WSSCC – Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council