The G8: What would you say?

Given the choice to discuss one topic with the G8, Matthew Anstee would argue the right for everyone to have safe drinking water.

Before: This is the water that used to support a whole community. After: A month later, a proud Mary at the newly built water spring.

Can you imagine living in a place where you have to walk for hours to the nearest water source? Where you have no choice but to drink the only water available to you, which is dirty and polluted and drinking it makes you and your family ill? It’s not a very attractive picture is it?

Unfortunately this is the reality for many people. One sixth of the world’s population lacks clean, safe water; that’s more than 1 billion people. In many areas an inadequate and dirty water supply has increased the death rate from easily curable illnesses: each year two million people, most of them children under five, die from diarrhoea. Having a safe, clean supply of water is one of the most basic human rights, so why are there so many people without it?

In 2005 I worked for a local charity in Kenya whose aim is to provide local people with safe drinking water. The charity works in partnership with local water techicians to organise the construction of water springs. With each spring that is completed the local commuity are given hygiene lessons, so they can benefit from both safe water and good hygiene practices. I found it remarkable how quickly the rates of illness reduced when a clean water supply and simple hygiene tips were provided.

Although highly successful, the charity’s on-going water spring project has one major problem - there is too much demand for water springs in the local area. The charity only has the capacity to concentrate its work in small, selected areas, leaving thousands of local people without safe water and susceptible to illness and disease.

Mike, a Kenyan volunteer for the charity, said that supplying people with clean water was the first step to local development. “As well as the health benefits, having a safe water supply frees up so much time for everybody. People can go to work and the children can go to school.”

Mike is right, which begs the question: how can a community ever develop without offering it’s population their basic needs? The truth is it can’t and I think it is about time the G8 realised this.The G8 need to set an example by using their financial and political power to combat this problem. How can we ever talk of progress in the development process when so many people have not even got clean water to drink?

The future looks even more uncertain as we continue to learn about the effects of climate change.The international community needs to recognise that having a safe water supply is a basic human right. There needs to be an international agenda worked out to provide safe water to the people that need it most.

It’s all very well signing up to the Millennium Development Goals but it needs to be understood that problems do not just go away if you put them on your ‘to do list’. It doesn’t cost much to change lives. When I was working in Kenya it cost only £100 to construct a water spring that will be used by a community of at least 50 people and for generations to come.

On one of my first days in Kenya, Mary, who headed up the charity, told me: “With the most basic needs, like safe drinking water, a community can build. Without them they struggle.”