Safe Water For All

Safe and clean drinking water and sanitation is a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights, the United Nations General Assembly declared in July this year, voicing deep concern that almost 900 million people worldwide do not have access to clean water.

Reading through this report blew my mind – I know that water is a growing concern for many people in the world, including myself as we don’t have access to our own well, however looking at some of the numbers that are mentioned in the report is really shocking –

An estimated 884 million people lack access to safe drinking water

A total of more than 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation

About 1.5 million children under the age of five die each year and 443 million school days are lost because of water- and sanitation-related diseases

We are lucky enough to have ready access to clean water without much effort on our behalf. As I said we don’t have out own well however we are lucky enough to have a neighbour with a good well and he is a great neighbour who generously allows us to use his well for drinking water.

We collect rain water for sanitation and usually we have enough rain water for our purposes, Ireland being a rainy country has it’s advantages. If we run out of water we can drive to a nearby town which has a canal system running through it and has drinking water available at the mooring piers.

We are mindful of our water use and try to avoid having to go to town to fill up water containers however the fact that we can just drive to town and get clean water makes us luckier than 884 million other people who do not have access to safe drinking water.

If you would like to do something to change this situation then please have a look at the petition badge on the left hand side of the blog and click on “sign petition”. Ask your friends to sign too, post it on facebook and tweet about it.

Safe water should be available to everyone…