2.3 billion people without toilets
Clean drinking water for everyone, that is our mission. But did you know that in our projects we do much more than just provide access to water? For example, access to toilets is also essential for a healthy life.
2.3 billion without a toilet
There are still 2.3 billion people worldwide who do not have access to safe and clean toilets, one third (!) of the world’s population. (Source: World Health Organisation)
Of these people, 892 million defecate in public, for example in street gutters, in the bushes, or in open water. That is even more than the 703 million who do not have access to water.
Not infrequently, children play between the stools and diseases can spread very quickly. These diseases mainly affect smaller children.
Water and sanitation
Our water projects are in fact almost all WASH projects. WASH is Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. So we not only install water supplies, but also provide toilets and provide information about hygiene.
Only this complete approach really improves health. Clean water alone is not enough to contain infectious diseases and give people a healthy basis in life.
The toilets we install are usually at the community level and not per household. On the right you see, for example, a drawing of a toilet block with changing room for girls at a school in Ethiopia.
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The toilet also caused us health problems. We sometimes literally took home the worms under our feet. Often we had no choice but to ask if we could use the toilet of one of the neighbors.
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SDG 6
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals state, among other things, that we want to give everyone access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2030. (SDG 6)
Although a positive development is visible, we are not going to make it with the current effort. In fact, we need to do four times as much as in the last 5 years to get to where we really want to do well.
Unfortunately, the countries where these people live are often unable to pay for or organize the water supplies themselves. That is why we give them a boost by financing the initial investments.
A drop?
Is our contribution then a drop in the ocean? Certainly not: in the past five years we have already managed to realize at least 10 billion liters of clean drinking water. With this we give at least 140,000 people permanent access to good facilities. That is just as much as the whole of Den Bosch and about 1% of the progress of this area worldwide.
A small contribution can already make a difference: for just over 20 euros we can give someone permanent access to safe drinking water. And for only 2.50 you can give someone enough clean drinking water for a year to drink, cook and wash!
Contribute to our mission too
You can do so in more ways than you might think.
