Today’s water crisis is not an issue of scarcity, but of access. More people in the world own cell phones than have access to a toilet. And as cities and slums grow at increasing rates, the situation worsens. Every day, lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills thousands, leaving others with reduced quality of life.
Unbelievable but true!
884 million people lack access to safe water supplies; approximately one in eight people.
3.575 million people die each year from water-related disease.
The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns.
Poor people living in the slums often pay 5-10 times more per liter of water than wealthy people living in the same city.
An American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than a typical person in a developing country slum uses in a whole day.
In just one day, more than 200 million hours of women’s time is consumed for the most basic of human needs — collecting water for domestic use.
This lost productivity is greater than the combined number of hours worked in a week by employees at Wal*Mart, United Parcel Service, McDonald’s, IBM, Target, and Kroger, according to Gary White, co-founder of Water.org.
Millions of women and children spend several hours a day collecting water from distant, often polluted sources.
A study by the International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC) of community water and sanitation projects in 88 communities found that projects designed and run with the full participation of women are more sustainable and effective than those that do not. This supports an earlier World Bank study that found that women’s participation was strongly associated with water and sanitation project effectiveness.
