About Azusa for Clean Water
We are a faith-based group that is dedicated to raising money and awareness to support clean water organizations working in developing countries. We hope to inspire people to learn about the global water crisis and to commit to take action for the nearly 1 billion people in the world who lack access to clean and sustainable water sources.
We shall not finally defeat AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, or any of the other infectious diseases that plague the developing world until we have also won the battle for safe drinking water, sanitation and basic health care. — Kofi Annan, Former Secretary-General United Nations
General Statistics
- Currently, 884 million people in the world lack access to clean and safe drinking water. That is one in every eight people worldwide. (United Nations. The Millenium Development Goals Report (New York: United Nations, 2009) 46.)
- Almost all of those people live in developing countries with 37% of them located in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the HIV/AIDS epidemic is most prevalent. (World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation. Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation: 2010 Update. (New York: UNICEF; Geneva: WHO), 7)
Why is Clean Water Important?
- Clean water is the basic foundation of good health, and has become one of the most important issues in international development today.
- Clean water has been declared a basic human need and a fundamental human right by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
- Not having access to clean and sustainable water sources negatively affects a multitude of other domains in a person’s life, such as health, family/community life, education, disease, and economic productivity to name a few. See below for more details.
Consequences of Not Having Access to Clean Water
(The following is simply a brief overview of the many multi-faceted effects of lacking access to clean water)Water and Disease:
- When forced to drink or use contaminated water, people are exposed to a variety of diseases including malaria, typhoid, dysentery, and cholera, to name a few.
- When coupled with HIV/AIDS (as is the case in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa), a person’s immune system is unable to fight off even simple diseases such as diarrhea, much less the ones mentioned above.
- Every day, water related diseases claim the lives of approximately 5,000 children, or roughly one child every 15 seconds (Living Water International 2009).
Water and Poverty:
- It is estimated that women in low-income countries spend 40 billion hours annually fetching and carrying water from sources far from home and that may not provide clean water. (WHO AND UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation. Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation: Special Focus on Sanitation. UNICEF, New York and WHO, Geneva, 2008.)
- Not only do individuals waste countless hours collecting water when they could be earning income in other ways, but most of their household income is used for purchasing water or treatment for water-related diseases.
- Unfortunately, while the poor also have less access, they are usually the ones who must pay the highest prices for clean water: residents of the slums of Jakarta, Nairobi, and Manila pay five to ten times more per unit of water than residents of high income areas in their own cities. (UNDP. 2006. Human Development Report 2006: Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty, and the Global Water Crisis,7)
Water and Education:
- Children who walk for hours every day to the closest water source are also unable to attend school, since most of their day consists of water collection.
- Those infected with water-related diseases either are unable to attend school due to cognitive deficiencies or absenteeism.
- The ones who suffer the most are girl children, as most of the 150 million children currently out of school are girls (UNICEF. Education the key to freeing tens of millions of children from hazardous labour 2008)
Water and Women:
- Women in developing countries spend anywhere between 15-20 hours a week collecting water. These long walks often expose women to danger – such as rape or abduction – or other bodily injuries from carrying heavy loads of water.
- Walking to collect water also takes away a woman’s time from participating in communities, caring for their families, or economic productivity.
- Because women are typically the family members that sacrifice other activities for water collection, not having access to safe drinking water is one of the underlying causes of gender inequality.
How much Does a Well Cost?
Cost per well depends on several factors, including geology, depth, and location. Lifewater has estimated that the average cost of bringing a shallow well with a hand pump to a community, together with hygiene training, is generally about $5,000. All new wells are part of more comprehensive projects that Lifewater plans with its in-country partners.About Lifewater International
Click here to read more about Lifewater International(Some of the information on this page is quoted directly from or paraphrased based on the content found at http://www.lifewater.org.)