Safe, clean water giving children the very best start in life

Water is essential to development in many different ways.

By providing the poorest communities with a supply that’s clean and safe, you not only safeguard people’s health but also begin a process of personal and social transformation.

With no water to hand, mothers and their young daughters go through the daily ordeal of fetching water from miles away and carrying it back home. It’s an exhausting journey through often dangerous territory, taking up the daylight hours, leaving girls no time to play and preventing them from gaining an education. Yet the water they work so hard to collect is often dirty and infected, spreading fatal diseases like malaria, cholera and diarrhoea. As a result, a fifth of the world’s poorest children will die of a preventable, waterborne illness before the age of five.

A local source of clean water, along with sanitation training, can help to reverse all this, reducing disease and freeing mothers and their daughters from this relentless task. Plan also ensures that women are represented on the water management committees set up to oversee the upkeep of boreholes and water pumps, fully integrating them into decision-making – often for the first time.

They become more confident and independent, eager to learn new skills that benefit their children. Their daughters in the meantime can attend school alongside their sons, giving them a fairer start in life.

The cost of supplying water and sanitation

£12,000 could provide safe, clean water for a community of over 1,000 people in Niger including the construction of a borehole, the training of a water management committee, and hygiene training.

£24,000 could provide 30 water tanks and pipeline connections for 38 communities in rural India, as well as providing training on sustainable farming benefiting over 40,000 individuals.

£74,823 could fund a water, hygiene and sanitation project in Togo – building boreholes, latrines and refuse areas and providing hygiene training. This could benefit over 1,920 children and 5,180 community members.