The Water Information Program

Water, our most basic need, is poised to be the most baffling challenge of the 21st century. It is being ignored wantonly at a time when more than 1 million people per year die from its scarcity and contamination. Children under age five account for at least 90 percent of water-related deaths. Meanwhile, economic productivity and educational opportunities are lost to illness, leaving millions more in an impoverished state even if they do survive their first five years of life. Access to water is a human right. Yet that statement makes many people uncomfortable. Most in the developed world can hardly imagine water being anything more than a nominal expense that is easily drawn from a faucet. They think, "Surely it is a commodity to be bought and sold. It hardly costs anything, and it is even reusable, so what's the big deal?" The big deal is that 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water at all. Most of those people live in Africa and Asia. But if you ask them whether water is a human right, they will laugh the notion off. But they will not discount water's importance. They will tell you that they walk up to 2 hours per day to fetch water that is often found in muddy puddles from rain runoff during the few brief months when rain does fall. This kind of water is rife with disease-causing organisms, which they drink unquestioningly.

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