• 894 million people in the world do not have access to safe water; this is roughly one sixth of the world's population.⁵
• 2.5 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation; roughly 1 billion of whom are children.⁵
• $1 alone can provide 1 person living in Africa with clean water for 1 year!

Clean water simply isn’t available in many developing countries. When it is available, it’s expensive or very difficult to access:

• Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water live on less than $2 a day.²
• Poor people living in the slums often pay 5-10 times more per liter of water than wealthy people living in the same city.²
• 40 billion working hours are spent carrying water each year in Africa.¹
• Households in rural Africa spend an average of 26% of their time fetching water, and it is generally women who are burdened with the task.¹

The lack of clean water is the cause of many of the diseases that are common in the developing world, and plays a large role in the AIDS pandemic:

• At any one time, half of the developing world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from water-related diseases.³
• 2.2 million die every year as a result of diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation. This amounts to around 6000 deaths a day, 4000 of those who are children under the age of 5, ³ or one death every 14 seconds, ² making water related disease the second biggest killer of children worldwide, after acute respiratory infections like tuberculosis.¹

Water related diseases include:

• Diarrhea. About 4 billion cases of diarrhea per year cause 2.2 million deaths, mostly among children under five.³
• Trachoma. About 6 million people are blind from trachoma, a disease caused by the lack of water combined with poor hygiene practices.³

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is affected by water related diseases as well. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) breaks down the immune system over a period of time until the person becomes vulnerable to common illnesses. At this stage, called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), infections from diarrhea and malaria, and other water-related diseases, can become fatal even for adults.⁴

• The world contains 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Nearly 3 million of these are children under 15 years.⁴
• In the least developed countries, up to 90% of AIDS patients suffer from chronic diarrheal diseases.⁴

And what about those of us in the US? How much water do we use?

• The average American individual uses 100 to 176 gallons of water at home each day. The average African family uses about 5 gallons of water each day.²

Now that you know, what are you going to do about it? Get Involved!

*Sources: ¹ WaterAid.org, ² Water.org, ³ UNICEF.org, ⁴ LifewaterInternational.org ⁵ unwater.org