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TIME FOR SOMETHING ELSE

In countries where there’s no direct access to clean drinking water, fetching water is mostly a women and girls task. Every day they spend about 30 minutes collecting water.* Because families are often very large, one 30-minutes-trip per day is usually not enough. It quite frequently happens that women spend more than an hour a day just to get water for their household.

Fetching water is not only time consuming, it is physically demanding. A typical bucket of 10 litres weighs 10 kilograms, which is a heavy burden especially for young girls. Next to the positive effect on health, improving access to clean drinking water brings more than (just) water. Girls can spend more time at school or to help in the household. For women it offers the possibility to work and earn extra money for the family.

This way drinking water projects indirectly contribute in the development of these women’s lives.

View the video above to see what the improved access to clean drinking water brought Mudondo. A girl from Bulamka, Uganda, where we completed our first project.

Unicef Progress on drinking water and sanitation - update 2012

 

Author: Josha Jansen - March 08 2013, 12:40