WaterAid – Water for life - nodig-construction.com

WaterAid – Water for life
"WaterAid’s vision is of a world where everyone has
access to safe water and effective sanitation"
WaterAid is an international NGO dedicated exclusively to
the pro-vision of safe domestic water, sanitation and
hygiene education to the world's poorest people.
Over a billion people don’t have safe water and over two
billion don’t have somewhere safe and clean to go to the
toilet. As a result a child dies every fifteen seconds from
water related diseases. These most basic services are
essential to life; without them vulnerable communities are trapped in the
stranglehold of disease and poverty. People’s livelihoods, education and dignity are
also affected.
WaterAid works by helping local organisations set up low cost, sustainable projects
using appropriate technology that can be managed by the community itself.
WaterAid also seeks to influence the policies of other key organisations, such as
governments, to secure and protect the right of poor people to safe, affordable
water and sanitation services. WaterAid is independent and relies heavily on
voluntary support.
WaterAid is dedicated to helping people escape the stranglehold of poverty and
disease caused by living without safe water and sanitation. WaterAid works in
partnership with local organisations in 15 countries in Africa and Asia to help poor
communities establish sustainable water supplies and latrines, close to home.
WaterAid also works to influence governments’ water and sanitation policies to
serve the interests of vulnerable people
In Mali, WaterAid's projects have included educating and building the skills of
communities to maintain their systems and raise the funds to keep them
operational. This has included income-generating schemes for women – including
soap making – and a revolving credit scheme. This scheme is helping to promote
drinking water hygiene by enabling people to buy covered buckets and use proper
hand washing facilities.
People like 51 year old Awa from Nafadji in Mali has described how life has
changed since WaterAid helped her community establish its own safe water supply:
"Before we spent all day fetching water. Now Nafadji women can go out first thing in
the morning to go to market and sell things. Some women sell vegetables:
aubergines, cabbages and tomatoes and some make soap to sell."
See the following pages for some alarming facts on water…

Global water and sanitation facts
• When combined water, sanitation and hygiene reduce
the number of deaths caused by diarrhoeal diseases by
an average of 65%
• The weight of water that women in Africa and Asia carry
on their heads is commonly 20kg, the same as the
average UK airport luggage allowance
• 2.2 million people in developing countries, most of them children, die every year
from diseases associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate
sanitation and poor hygiene
• At least 90% of drinkable water in the world is underground. This source of
water is increasingly threatened with depletion and contamination
• Since 1950 the world population has doubled but water consumption has
increased six-fold
• Diarrhoea alone kills 1.8 million children under five every year, but most cases
can be prevented or treated.
Key WaterAid facts
• A child dies every 15 seconds from water-related diseases. This amounts to
nearly 6000 deaths, or the equivalent of 20 jumbo jets crashing, every day
• WaterAid projects providing safe water, sanitation and hygiene education cost
just £15 per head
• 1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to safe water, this is roughly
one sixth of the world’s population
• 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, this is
roughly two-fifths of the world’s population
• It is 12% more likely that children will attend school if water is available within
15 minutes rather than one hour's walk. 11% more girls attend school when
sanitation is available
• The simple act of washing hands with soap and water can reduce diarrhoeal
diseases by over 40%
Water use
• The average person in the UK uses 135 litres of water every day
• The average person in the developing world uses 10 litres of water every day
for their drinking, washing and cooking. This is the same amount used in the
average flush of a UK toilet
• On current trends over the next 20 years humans will use 40% more water than
they do now

• The average amount of water needed to produce one kilogramme of potatoes is
1000 litres, wheat is 1450 litres and rice is 3450 litres
• Agriculture accounts for over 80% of the world’s water consumption
• 40 billion working hours are spent carrying water each year in Africa
Water resources
• Only 0.008% of the planet's water is available for human
consumption, and is found in lakes, rivers and underground
aquifers
• It would cost an estimated extra US$16 billion each year to
reach the Millennium Development Goals, agreed by all UN
Governments, of halving the proportions of people without
access to safe water and sanitation. This is less then North
Americans and Europeans spend on pet food in one year
• Icecaps and glaciers hold 74% of the world’s freshwater. All
the rest is deep underground or locked in soils as moisture or
permafrost. Only 0.3% of the world’s freshwater is found in
rivers or lakes
• Over 80 countries with 40% of the world’s population are
subject to water shortages
• The number of people living in water-stressed countries is
projected to climb from 470 million to three billion by 2025.
(NB The threshold for ‘water stress’ is a per capita
availability of 1700m3 of water. For water scarcity the
threshold is 1000m3.)
“I come to this water hole
once a day and fill up two
20 litre buckets. It takes
me over an hour to fill up
the buckets. The six
people in my family have
to use just these two
buckets.’’
• Your donations really do make a difference:
• £3 pays for a latrine cover slab serving a family of up to seven people
in Nepal
• £460 pays for two public water points used by 500 people in Ethiopia
• £4000 pays for community-wide hygiene and sanitation training
benefiting 1000 people in Tanzania
•
For more information on what WaterAid does and how you can support
them go to www.wateraid.org