Water and Sanitation
Just imagine:
- Not having a tap in your house.
- Walking a mile to collect polluted water for cooking and drinking.
- Five of your eight children dying of water-borne diseases.
- The joy of having a bore hole in your village from which everyone can pump clean water.
Why Water and Sanitation?
Action for Poverty’s integrated approach to relief of poverty involves extending water and sanitation services to communities faced with water scarcity, unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
“That 2.6 billion people around the world are forced to defecate in plastic bags, buckets, open pits, agricultural fields, and public areas in their communities should generate a collective outcry for immediate, concerted efforts to expand access to improved sanitation facilities. ,,
— The UN Millennium Project Task ForceReport on Water and Sanitation:Health, Dignity, and Development:What Will it Take?
Water and Sanitation is one of the primary drivers of public health. Action for poverty refers to it as ‘Health 101,’ which means that once we can secure access to clean water and to adequate sanitation facilities for all people, irrespective of the difference in their living conditions, a huge battle against all kinds of diseases will be won.
Unfortunately, an estimated 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water while a staggering 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. This result in some 2.2 million deaths each year, mostly among children – deaths that can easily be prevented through cost-effective measures.
Action for Poverty has developed its water and sanitation expertise over the years of field work, advancing a number of solutions for populations at risk from water insecurity. We truck water into affected communities during emergencies, decontaminate wells and install hand-pumps. Employing sophisticated geophysics, we are able to locate water resources and tap aquifers. We protect natural springs and pipe water into villages and health centres and we rehabilitate damaged infrastructure to ensure access to adequate sources of clean water.
How we provide access to clean water
A primary concern of Action for Poverty’s projects is to facilitate the provision of and access to clean drinking water. We do this by:
- Trucking water during emergencies until permanent sources can be established.
- Drilling new wells (that require buckets) and boreholes (that require pumps)
- Installing water storage tanks and above-ground reservoirs
- Cleaning contaminated water sources
- Tapping and preserving springs
- Improving and installing local sanitation systems, including drainage networks and latrines
- Creating hygiene bathing facilities where infrastructure has been damaged by natural disaster or warfare
- Improving and installing irrigation systems
Our programmes long-term benefits would be hard to sustain without our meticulous commitment to community participation. Developing and extending water and sanitation services involves much more than quick technical fixes. To sustain water and sanitation improvements, a community-centered approach is central to building local capacity and harnessing a population’s participation, sense of ownership, energy and resources. By organising and training community-based water committees, we ensure local commitment to managing and maintaining the system we rehabilitate and install. In our campaign to eradicate poverty, clean water is as essential as food, but only the cultivation of local know-how can ensure its sustainability.
While the scale of global need is truly daunting, we know how to extend water and sanitation improvements, how to instil better hygiene practices, and how to teach populations to manage these resources themselves. Action for Poverty’s programmes alone reaches 500,000 people each year; reinforcing these efforts is one way to improve conditions for vulnerable communities around the world-populations whose lack of water leaves them vulnerable to daily indignities and appalling rates of death and debilitation.