WORLD WATER DAY

World Water Day is on the 22nd March and it is an international day that celebrates the water that comes out of our taps. The main celebrations will take place at the United Nations University HQ in Tokyo and on this occasion the World Water Development Report 2014 will be launched and the UN “Water For Life” Best Practices Award will be given.

We all know why water matters and “Just A Drop”, an international water aid charity have asked me to join their campaign. Their aim is very simple, it is to give people clean water. Sounds so simple doesn’t it? Given that the human body is made up of 70% water, it should be just as accessible to all as the air that we breathe. However, we all know that sadly isn’t the case and in 1998 Fiona Jeffery’s OBE founded the charity when she learned that just £1 could provide water to a child for 10 years. The main premise was that if people can be encouraged to give a little then collectively we can make a huge difference. The charity:

• Provides clean water and sanitation facilities to some of the poorest communities around the world through the construction of wells, boreholes, pipelines, hand pumps and latrines
• Encourages the establishment of health, hygiene and sanitation training programmes
• Operates with a handful of full-time staff and an army of volunteers, many of whom are retired military officers and water engineers with experience on global water development projects
• Has carried out over 130 projects across 31 countries, reaching an estimated 1.5 million people from Afghanistan to Zambia.

Last year Just a Drop has supported 40 projects in nine countries on three continents. In Africa they worked in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia; in Latin America their projects were in Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti and Mexico; and in Asia they supported two projects in India. These projects reached an estimated 133,000 people last year.

Over 768 million people in the world do not have access to clean safe water which is astonishing. Consequently diseases attributable to dirty water and poor sanitation currently result in the deaths of more children globally than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.

I’ve been asked by Just A Drop to spread the word via a network of bloggers who all want to help out where we can. It would be great if you could keep the ball rolling and tomorrow check out the blog post that Just A Drop themselves will be posting on their website at http://www.justadrop.org/blog/ the charity itself, so please do pop over to give them your support for this very important cause.

In addition, H2WOW is sponsoring every ‘share’, ‘like’, ‘tweet’ and ‘comment’, so please please share this post and we can help raise some money as well as awareness.