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Unsafe water and poor sanitation claim 4,500 lives day. What should we do about it?

On Monday, March 22, World Water Day celebrates its 17th year of publicizing water issues with the theme “Clean Water for a Healthy World.” Our Global Issues/Citizen Voices essay contest highlights this theme with hopes of prolonging the conversation. From entrants detailing first-hand accounts of how the lack of access to clean water has affected the lives of their families and communities to policy-based analyses of the issues and solutions, the participants consider a range of points, each adding a unique perspective to the dialogue.

Yet 1.1 billion people continue to live without access to reliable sources of clean water.

Imagine, for a moment, that you had to walk for miles to find clean water. Imagine again, if you lived in a country devastated by civil war and humanitarian disaster, and your only source of water was contaminated by the runoff from refugee camps—garbage, human excrement, and people bathing.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon issued a statement today. “Water is the source of life and the link that binds all living beings on this planet,” he said. “It is connected directly to all our United Nations goals: improved maternal and child health and life expectancy, women's empowerment, food security, sustainable development and climate change adaptation and mitigation.” There is good news: there have been vast improvements in water and sanitation—so much so that 87% of the world population can now access safe drinking water, and is on-target to meet the targets identified in the Millennium Development Goals. The majority of these improvements have been in rural areas.

90% of the 1.1 billion people forced to defecate in open areas due to a lack of toilets or latrines are rural dwellers. Conditions such as these are the primary cause of the 1.5 million deaths of children under five years old due to diarrhoeal diseases, the UN reports. Such needless deaths have been called “an affront to our common humanity” by Ban Ki-Moon. In addition to faecal contamination risks, poor personal hygiene, agricultural and livestock runoff, and inadequate garbage disposal services can spread water-borne diseases.