Overview
-
Why Water
It is the #1 need of
the global poor. -
Leverage your Impact
Wells alone will not be much help.
-
Maintenance
is EssentialBut too often
entirely neglected. -
Women & Children
Learn how you can help
them save billions of hours. -
Strengthening
the ChurchUnderstand how groups incorporate the gospel
-
Community Transformation
The water crisis is not
an engineering problem -
Water can do Harm
Sometimes good intentions are
not enough
1WHY WATER
Right now, 884 million people lack access to clean, safe drinking water. This lack of access to water and sanitation causes 80% of all disease and kills more people than all forms of violence, including war. At any given time, half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from diseases associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
These are not only shocking statistics, they are an opportunity for you to be part of a solution! At a remarkably low cost, your gift can have a huge impact on people's lives - both physically and spiritually. Clean water can be a means of sharing the gospel message, offering people a chance to receive new life in Christ that in the words of Jesus will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
Here are some key things to know about the sector before you give, because water projects are not as simple as just putting in a well:
2LEVERAGE IMPACT: SANITATION AND HYGIENE
If you want to cut down on disease and child deaths, clean water well is just the starting point. The impact of drilling a well is significant in time savings and empowerment, but it can only decrease disease by 25% or less.
Hygiene and Sanitation (teaching people how to wash their hands and build toilets) is even more effective than clean water alone in reducing water borne disease. The most effective is to combine all three - Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH).
Sanitation and hygiene are best taught through schools and water committees, but it takes time. Many organizations see only the engineering problem of putting in a well and neglect the social change process that is really needed. Building latrines and doing one sanitation session is not enough.
Question to ask: How do you assess the effectiveness of your hygiene and sanitation intervention?
3Operations and Maintenance is Essential
What happens when the well-drilling non profit leaves? If the well breaks there is often no-one to fix it and the village goes back to being sick from drinking dirty water. Before you give, ask your organization about their plan for operations and maintenance of their wells. Here’s why it’s so important:
- More than 50,000 rural water points in Africa (36% of the total) are
non-functional. In Sierra Leone the figure is 65%. (UNICEF) - Over 50 percent of all water projects fail, less than five percent of projects
are visited, and far less than one percent have any longer-term monitoring. - A 1-week breakdown in a well can eliminate all annual health benefits because
the village gets re-infected with the diseases they carried before.
Question to ask: How many of your wells are still functioning two years later and what are you doing to gather this information?
4Women and Children
Lack of access to clean water disproportionately affects women and children. Water-related illness kills approximately 4000 children every day – that’s one every 20 seconds.
Women and children bear the burden of collecting contaminated water which is sometimes miles away so their families can survive. Each day women in the developing world collectively spend more than 200 million hours carrying water from contaminated water holes, risking harassment and sexual assault along the way. Children often drop out of school and women lose many hours of productive time to fetch water.
5An opportunity to share the gospel and strengthen the local church
The gift of clean water provides an excellent opportunity to love your neighbor and share the gospel. When done well, it can also be a great opportunity to strengthen the local church.
Paired appropriately with a church planter, clean water can open doors into new areas of the country and provide access and love in places where the gospel has never been preached.
Each organization has a different approach to this, so make sure their approach matches your heart and view on evangelism.
Question to ask: How does your Christian identity manifest itself in your work?
6Convenient access to clean water can
transform lives and communities
- Studies show that $1 invested in clean water can yield $12 on average in benefits
- 5.5 billion adult productive days that are lost every year due to diarrhea diseases can be spent in productive ways (vegetable plots, small businesses, etc)
- Children are healthy and freed up to go to school
- Women are empowered through leadership roles on water committees
- Combined with hygiene and sanitation, clean water can dramatically reduce levels of water borne disease in a community.
7Water can do Harm
Thoughtless investment in Water can do unintentional harm. Just giving people a well without training or “skin in the game” deepens their sense of dependency on the giving of others. It can also promote corruption in the local governments that are commissioned to drill wells – when a non-profit digs the well, they often pocket the money that was allocated for that community. At a more basic community level, wells often become a source of conflict as different groups try to take control of the water source.
