Despite the fundamental role of water for human health, survival, and development, today more than 750 million people live without access to clean water1. Moreover, 2.5 billion people do not have access to adequate sanitation 2. As a result of these realities, every minute a child dies from a water-related disease, and more than 840,000 people lose their lives due to lack of access to clean water and sanitation.
Every one out of nine people do not have access to clean water which results in women and children spending more than 140 million hours a day collecting water4. During water collection, women and children put their lives at risk due to attacks from both by wild animals and people. Additionally, while every dollar spent on water and sanitation yields a return of four dollars, the estimated annual loss from lack of access to water results in a 260 billion dollar loss5. Despite this, only six percent of the international aid is spent on this issue.
In recognition of all these facts about the importance of access to clean water, our organization chooses to allocate a significant portion of its resources on increasing access to clean water. With the purpose of taking into account different contextual conditions in the field, we employ four different methods.
The first and most frequent solution adopted by our organization is installing water wells with hand pumps. In most of the countries with no permanent fresh surface water, it is possible to provide access to clean water by utilizing the underground water resources.
To this day, our organization has opened more than 2,130 water wells providing more than four million people with access to clean water. The distribution of new water wells by year can be seen in the chart.