The Problem of Water, and the Facts
What would your life be like without access to clean water? This is a question that nearly one billion people already know the answer to. Why, because it is their life.
What about without adequate sanitation? 2.5 billion people know this answer too well.
Though some of us may take clean water for granted, the fact is that clean water is projected to be the most valuable commodity in coming decades.
Why is it so valuable? Because it is scarce, because it is fragile, and because without it life becomes untenable.
On our earth today, unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation causes nearly 80% of all sickness and disease that the human population suffers from.
This is staggering to comprehend. Every minute, even as you read this, four children will die from a preventable water-related disease.
While the world waits to implement ready solutions, the absence of clean water and sanitation will kill more people every year than all forms of violence combined, including war.
The problem of water access is not simply ethical, or confined in its impact to places “far away”. Governments around the world are now facing international and regional disputes over water, and are faced with the hard realities of water scarcity and contamination and its economic impacts, the unsustainable use of groundwater and its development impacts, and ecological degradation with its irrevocable impact on the future.
The issue is so pressing that the United Nations General Assembly, in July of 2010, passed a resolution upholding that access to clean water is no less than a fundamental human right. This democratic decision by nations of the world reveals that access to clean water not only trumps concerns such as economics and politics, but is recognized as being fundamental to the very stability of the driving institutions of our world.
Here’s a glimpse of what that link between water and economy looks like: In rural Africa, women and children can spend up to 8 hours a day fetching water from unprotected wells, 10 miles on average, and twice that in the dry season. Rural Africans spend an accumulated 40 billion hours every year just walking to collect water, taking precious time from education, healthy economic development, and improving their lot. The social and economic impacts of disease borne from the unclean water they collect only increase this lost energy.
HALFWAY THERE
NGOs and government organizations have been working incrementally for decades to improve water access in these areas, but their efforts have been compromised, often by technology. They have not have access to technology that is engineered for the situation at hand.
Previous generations of clean water technology have been cumbersome to transport, complex to set up, prone to breakage due to many moving parts, and over the longer term have been difficult to maintain. Many have been completely inadequate in remote areas, for their reliance on energy infrastructure or solid fuels. These simple hurdles have dramatically and adversely effected the long-term success of the good intentions of many people and organizations.
Delivering A Whole Solution
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) call for reducing the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by half between 1990 and 2015. We are working hard to make these goals become a reality.
At LifeGivingForce (LGF) we envisage and work towards a day when every person on the planet has access to clean water, where no one is left in want of this most basic resource. We agree with the majority voice of the planet that access to clean, safe drinking water is a fundamental human right.
LGF specializes in providing state-of-the-art water solutions in developing countries and emergency areas where the absence of public power or water infrastructure has created a threat to public health and security.
LGF deploys its expertise and technologies in areas where energy-independence, low maintenance, agile transportation, and rapid response are critical requirements. We provide solutions for delivering safe, clean drinking water, focusing on five key factors:
- lowest cost per liter – reduced long-term provisioning cost
- legacy sustainability – through tapping into local water resources
- high-efficiency purification – to provide clean water to the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time
- self-sufficiency in off-grid settings - to support populations lacking power and water infrastructure
- technology that is simple to use and easy to maintain – to ensure that the given community can take charge of the maintenance
LGF currently has water projects with the United Nations – MINUSTAH, WORLD VISION and other NGO’s in Haiti.
Solutions
The Problem of Water, and the Facts
What about without adequate sanitation? 2.5 billion people know this answer too well.
Why is it so valuable? Because it is scarce, because it is fragile, and because without it life becomes untenable.
This is staggering to comprehend. Every minute, even as you read this, four children will die from a preventable water-related disease.
The problem of water access is not simply ethical, or confined in its impact to places “far away”. Governments around the world are now facing international and regional disputes over water, and are faced with the hard realities of water scarcity and contamination and its economic impacts, the unsustainable use of groundwater and its development impacts, and ecological degradation with its irrevocable impact on the future.
The issue is so pressing that the United Nations General Assembly, in July of 2010, passed a resolution upholding that access to clean water is no less than a fundamental human right. This democratic decision by nations of the world reveals that access to clean water not only trumps concerns such as economics and politics, but is recognized as being fundamental to the very stability of the driving institutions of our world.
Here’s a glimpse of what that link between water and economy looks like: In rural Africa, women and children can spend up to 8 hours a day fetching water from unprotected wells, 10 miles on average, and twice that in the dry season. Rural Africans spend an accumulated 40 billion hours every year just walking to collect water, taking precious time from education, healthy economic development, and improving their lot. The social and economic impacts of disease borne from the unclean water they collect only increase this lost energy.
HALFWAY THERE
NGOs and government organizations have been working incrementally for decades to improve water access in these areas, but their efforts have been compromised, often by technology. They have not have access to technology that is engineered for the situation at hand.
Previous generations of clean water technology have been cumbersome to transport, complex to set up, prone to breakage due to many moving parts, and over the longer term have been difficult to maintain. Many have been completely inadequate in remote areas, for their reliance on energy infrastructure or solid fuels. These simple hurdles have dramatically and adversely effected the long-term success of the good intentions of many people and organizations.
Delivering A Whole Solution
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) call for reducing the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by half between 1990 and 2015. We are working hard to make these goals become a reality.
At LifeGivingForce (LGF) we envisage and work towards a day when every person on the planet has access to clean water, where no one is left in want of this most basic resource. We agree with the majority voice of the planet that access to clean, safe drinking water is a fundamental human right.
LGF specializes in providing state-of-the-art water solutions in developing countries and emergency areas where the absence of public power or water infrastructure has created a threat to public health and security.
LGF deploys its expertise and technologies in areas where energy-independence, low maintenance, agile transportation, and rapid response are critical requirements. We provide solutions for delivering safe, clean drinking water, focusing on five key factors:
LGF currently has water projects with the United Nations – MINUSTAH, WORLD VISION and other NGO’s in Haiti.