Water is essential to healthy and sustainable communities.  A safe water supply is integral to agricultural, urban and rural life and greatly affects an individual’s health as well as children’s growth and community viability.  Securing a safe and healthy water supply has profound health benefits for individuals and also aids in the development and independence of communities. Click here to learn more.

Statistics

The WHO estimates that over 1 billion people do not have access to clean drinking water. This means that for almost one person in six of the global population drinking water poses a constant threat of illness or life-threatening disease. Click here to learn more.

Health Implications

Unsafe water causes 80% of all sickness and disease in the developing world and kills more people than war. Cholera, typhoid fever, amebic and bacillary dysentery, diahrroea, hepatitis A and E are all common illnesses in Laos contracted from drinking unclean water. Click here to learn more.

MDG/UN Human Rights

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) represent a global partnership that has grown from the commitments and targets established at the world summits of the 1990s. Responding to the world’s main development challenges and to the calls of civil society, the MDGs promote poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases.

Set for the year 2015, the MDGs are an agreed set of goals that can be achieved if all actors work together and do their part. Click here to learn more.

Click here to read Noy’s story of how dirty water impacted her life.  There are one billion stories just like this one.