Millennium
Development Goal #4
This goal is to reduce the worldwide mortality rate of children under the age of five.
* Every day, over 26,000 children under the age of five die from preventable diseases.
(Source: UNICEF Global Database, 2007)
* In developing countries, one child out of ten dies before reaching the age of five.
(Source: United Nations Human Development Report, 2006)
* For children under age five, water-related diseases are the second-leading cause of death.
(Source: UNICEF Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group, 2006)
* Every 15 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease.
(Source: United Nations Human Development Report, 2006)
Child mortality is the “perfect storm” of worldwide poverty. Impoverished families have severely limited access to clean water, food, and medical treatment. When a child becomes ill, working parents often must make the agonizing choice between the child’s health and the caretaker’s livelihood. If a parent must leave work to care for a sick child, there will be less money to provide for the vital needs of the child and the rest of the family. Often the solution requires that the child’s siblings are pressed into the caretaker’s role, which results in diminished educational opportunities for them. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle of disease, death, and poverty.
For millions of families, this cycle of suffering begins with unclean water.
When a child becomes ill by drinking or washing with contaminated water, the child usually becomes dehydrated and malnourished due to diarrhea, which is the most common symptom of the three major worldwide water-borne diseases: cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever. Drinking more unpurified water only further aggravates the child’s condition. Again, the cycle is deadly.
Approximately one in six people on earth lack access to a safe water supply. Twice that number lack access to improved sanitation. Millions of women and children spend several hours daily collecting water by hand from distant sources. Often the only source is an open body of water where women do their laundry and livestock are watered. Municipal water supplies, even when available, often are contaminated as a result of over-burdened sanitation systems.
Our own experience in Honduras is instructive. Even in the tourist-friendly center of Copan Ruinas, where we stay during our mission trips, you must not drink the tap water.
Overall, no intervention has greater impact upon national development and worldwide public health than the provision of safe drinking water and adequate sanitation systems. The tragedy of infant mortality is all the more poignant because it is preventable. We can help.
Our 4th Millennium Development Goal Sunday is January 13th
The outreach committee has chosen WaterPartners International (www.water.org) as the organization we would like to support with our special collection on January’s Millennium Development Goal Sunday. WaterPartners International is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization
committed exclusively to providing safe drinking water and sanitation to people in developing countries. WPI has been in operation since 1990, and has received the “Best In America Seal” from the Independent Charities of America for its rigorous standards of public accountability and program/cost effectiveness.
Since 1990, WPI has operated in eight developing countries: Bangladesh, India, Ethiopia, Kenya, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and the Phillippines. As an operating philosophy WPI is fully committed to developing partnerships with carefully selected local organizations that will result in locally-based and technologically appropriate water and sanitation solutions. In addressing the needs of its partner organizations, WPI stresses a flexible, target-oriented approach, measurable indicators, feedback from the local community, educational reinforcement of proper hygienic practices, sensitivity to cultural norms, and coordination with all political and social structures.
WPI also has initiated a micro-loan program, The WaterCredit Initiative, which is the first social entrepreneurial organization of its kind devoted exclusively to enabling communities to finance their own water and sanitation systems. The WaterCredit Initiative recognizes that many families must pay private water vendors between five to ten times as much as they would for water that could be supplied by a municipal water system, if only financing for such a municipal system were available. The WaterCredit Initiative addresses this problem by making loans to carefully screened communities to cover the capital cost of constructing water and sanitation projects, and also by channeling the loan repayments into funding for future projects for other communities.
The WaterCredit Initiative was begun with pilot projects in Bangladesh and India in 2004. Those loans have been repaid and are now helping a second group of communities to develop their own water systems. This program also was successfully extended into Kenya in 2005.
Independent studies show that the WaterPartners system offers a long-term sustainable solution to the clean water crisis. In July 2006, Emory University’s Center For Global Safe Water studied a random sampling of WPI projects in Honduras. The study revealed that all of the projects studied were still fully operational, even though some of them were ten years old. The results also showed that 98% of respondents surveyed were highly satisfied with the system, and concluded that the success of these projects was due in no small part to WPI’s emphasis upon intensive community involvement in the planning and operation of each project.
Last year around the world, WaterPartners International and the WaterCredit Initiative established safe water and sanitation facilities for approximately 40,000 people.
As with several of the programs featured on our Millennium Development Goal Sundays, Water Partners International provides opportunity rather than charity - a hand up rather than a hand out. Please help with your prayers and financial support on January 13th.