World Water Day is today and the lovely folk at Just a Drop have asked me to post about why water matters. And, in sponsorship of this post, H2WOW are donating 5p to Just a Drop for each ‘share’, ‘tweet’, ‘like’ or ‘comment’, so please show your support.

But the simple fact that I really had to think about my response to why water mattered, showed me that I take water for granted. A few months ago we had no water for three hours and I was ridiculously stressed. Now, typing those words, I feel even more ridiculous.

Every day, I turn taps in my home and clean water gushes out. I am clean, my clothes are clean, my dishes are clean, my teenagers have a million showers a day, my daughter enjoys hot bubbly baths, I have a pint of tap water beside me at all times. Water flows through my day, yet I’d never stopped and considered how lucky I am to have clean water for myself and for my children.

I admit that I was shocked to learn that diseases attributable to dirty water and poor sanitation currently result in the deaths of more children globally that AIDS, malaria and measles combined.

Just a Drop

Just a Drop is an international water aid charity with a very simple plan: to give people clean water. It was founded in 1998 by Fiona Jeffery OBE when she learned that just £1 could provide water to a child for 10 years. 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 supported 40 projects in 9 countries on 3 continents. There projects reached an estimated 133,000 people last year.

A brighter future

Imagine this scene.

It is a water hole near a dirt road in rural Uganda, where people wash their greasy motorbikes. The animals have already drunk their fill, and now a 10 year old girl, Gertrude Namakon, fills a 20 litre jerry can with this same water, teeming with infectious bacteria. Just like every other day, she has joined around 200 other Ugandan villagers at 6am and walked two miles across the fields.

Now she lugs the heavy jerry can home and finally she can go to school, to pick up the remnants of her education. All of Gertrude’s youthful energy is channelled into bringing home this water, which will inevitably infect her and her younger siblings with bouts of diarrhoea and dysentery, forcing them to stay away from school.

Gertrude is the same age as my daughter. My daughter’s school is unhappy if her attendance is under 95%, yet around the world 443 million school days are lost each year due to water-related illness.

Just a Drop built a well and pump near Gertrude’s school, so she now has clean, safe water on her doorstep. Thanks to this, she is now determined to get an education. “It will make a big difference to my life. It will be wonderful to be able to get clean water from a well without being sick all the time. Now I can focus on my studies and perhaps even become a teacher myself one day,” she says.

The burden on Gertrude’s young shoulders, to collect the water her family need to cook, drink and wash in is not unusual and causes the absenteeism of an estimated 29 million primary school-aged children (the majority of them girls) in Africa. Hopefully, thanks to Just a Drop, Gertrude is now one of the lucky ones.

Will you help? RT, Like, Comment, Share to help raise funds:

This blog post has been written to help international water aid charity, Just a Drop, raise awareness of the vital work they carry out in developing countries around the world - providing clean, safe water to those who need it most.

In addition, H2WOW is sponsoring every single ‘share’, ‘like’, ‘tweet’ and ‘comment’. They’re donating 5p for each ‘share’, ‘tweet’, ‘like’ or ‘comment’, so please show your support!

It’s a simple way to help, please take a moment to raise funds and know that every single penny counts. For more information on the Just a drop, please visit their website.