Safe Water Access – Context of Poverty

Safe water is essential to healthy living; yet those living in poverty struggle to gain access to any water, let alone safe water. For children living in extreme poverty, there are multiple challenges to locating, collecting and purifying water.

Children often walk long distances to fetch water:

• The time spent takes away from school and from work (for parents).
• The supply is limited to what a child can carry; sometimes multiple trips are necessary.
• The effort is draining, sapping a child’s energy early in the day.
• These long walks can also be dangerous as predators (human and/or wildlife) may be hiding in wait along the children’s path.

Limited water supplies are often dangerous:

• Animal and human waste, parasites and pollution can contaminate standing water collected from a pond or water collected from rivers and streams.
• The severe diarrhea caused by water-borne diseases can kill a child whose parents cannot afford to buy needed medicines.

Purifying water is expensive:

• Buying firewood to boil water is expensive; many times a lack of funds means the only choice is to drink the unpurified water and wait for the illness to arrive.
• Fetching firewood costs time and can hurt the local environment.
• The expense of drinking unpurified water involves the time missed at school or work as well as the cost of medical care.
• The supply of purified water is limited by the family’s capacity to boil it over a fire.
• There is also an expense of time when water is boiled. You must wait for it to boil and then to cool before drinking.