Water

Our charity of the month is focusing  on Water.

How many times have we opened a plastic water bottle, left it in the backseat of our car for a day or two and then threw it away?

What many of us take for granted – is not available for a billion people.

Without water, life would not exist. It is a prerequisite for all human and economic development.

Yet today, nearly one billion people – about one in eight – lack access to clean water. More than twice that many, 2.5 billion people, don’t have access to a toilet.

Every 20 seconds, a child dies from a water-related illness.

Women spend 200 million hours a day collecting water.

How far would do they have to go?

Women walk three miles to harvest contaminated water for their families.

There has been significant public attention paid to the issue of water scarcity lately, and for good reason. Although water is a renewable resource, it is also a finite one. Only 2.53 percent of earth’s water is fresh, and some two-thirds of that is locked up in glaciers and permanent snow cover. But despite the very real danger of future global water shortages, for the vast majority of the nearly one billion people without safe drinking water, today’s water crisis is not an issue of scarcity, but of access.

The health and economic impacts of today’s global water crisis are staggering.

• More than 3.5 million people die each year from water-related disease; 84 percent are children. Nearly all deaths, 98 percent, occur in the developing world.
• Lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills children at a rate equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every four hours.
• Lack of sanitation is the world’s biggest cause of infection.
• Millions of women and children spend several hours each day collecting water from distant, often polluted sources. This is time not spent working at an income-generating job, caring for family members, or attending school.

443 million school days are lost each year due to water-related illness.

How far will you go?

For $25, you can give someone water for life. Learn more at  ‪http://water.org

Please also visit Water on Facebook – Water on Youtube