At Global Breakthrough, we celebrate other’s efforts to alleviate poverty and to address other social justice concerns. Today we give props to charity:water. Charity: water is a non-profit organization designed to help the impoverished access sources of clean and safe water close to their homes.  

The Statistics
According to water.org, one in eight people lack access to clean drinking water; that’s nearly one billion individuals. Of that number, nearly two of every three who lack access to clean drinking water live on less than $2 a day, and one in three survive on less than $1 a day. Furthermore, water is considerably more costly for impoverished individuals in developing countries than it is for those with much higher incomes in first world countries. Even within the same city, however, people living in the slums may pay up to 10 times more for a liter of water than wealthier people pay. In addition, 1.2 billion people have no access to sanitation at all; of this number, more than 385 million people live on less than $1 a day, and 660 million subsist on less than $2 a day.

In essence, water is crisis of poverty.

What does all this mean? The consequences are numerous. For instance, water related diseases are responsible for the deaths of more than 3.5 million people each year. Indeed, “[d]iseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war” (charity: water). Children are often the most susceptible: one child dies every 20 seconds from water related diseases (water.org).

Also, sources of water, much of which is contaminated, are often hours away from people’s homes. Women and children are usually the water collectors, and in “Africa alone, people spend 40 billion hours every year just walking for water” (charity: water). For children, this is time that could be spent in school. For both women and children, water collection journeys can be dangerous.

The Value of Charity: Water
Charity: water has funded more than 6,185 water projects in the past five years. What they do is great because every dollar a person donates goes directly into one of their water projects. They offer proof of where the money has gone and for what purposes it being used. You can see how this works at charitywater.org/projects. For operating expenses, even for paying their employees, they rely on private donations so no money is taken away from the work they do.

To see more of what they did in 2011, check out the following video: