Water for life

1 – Water is essential to life. Clean water is vital for drinking, growing food and keeping clean. A person can only survive on average three days without water, and if the water they have is dirty and contaminated, fatal diseases spread quickly and the effects are devastating.

2 – The lack of clean water is silently killing one child every single minute. The statistics are truly shocking: nearly 800 million people have no access to clean water, while a woman in Africa walks an average of 6 km a day to fetch clean water. The problem is getting worse as climate change causes more and more droughts, leaving large areas of land dry and arid.

3 – Water is so much more than just a drink: it’s needed to cook food, water crops and livestock, wash hands and cooking pots to stop diseases spreading. Islamic Relief aims to give people all over the world water for life.Islamic Relief foundation believes in giving water for life. Its mission is to provide water for the locals. When we build a water system, we want to ensure that after we leave, the locals never need to ask for help accessing water again.That’s why we take a carefully tailored approach in each area. In some areas there is no groundwater, so digging a well won’t work – we build a system which catches rainwater instead. In countries which have wet, rainy seasons followed by long, dry periods, we construct micro-dams and reservoirs to store the water safely for use all year round. And to save women and children the difficult physical task of pumping water by hand, we harness natural energy with solar-powered wells.

4 – It isn’t just about building systems – it’s about building people too. Five years ago, more than 50,000 water points across Africa had failed, because no-one taught the communities how to maintain and repair them when they broke. We train local people to take care of their new systems, as well as teaching them how to use water safely in order to improve health and hygiene, so that when we leave, they have truly been given water for life.

Adapted from Islamic relief foundation

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