Day 17

In many parts of the world, access to clean water is not a guaranteed right. To provide water for a family’s needs, women and girls have to travel long distances daily, sometimes as far as 10 kilometres to a well, where they will then pay as much as half the family’s daily income to buy 20 litres of water. They then have to carry this back home, usually on their heads. This puts pressure on their spines and especially their neck, storing up painful and debilitating problems for later life such as arthritis, spondulosis and other degenerative and crippling diseases. It shortens their lives and reduces their effectiveness as working people, both within the home and in the employment market.

While they are carrying water to and fro, they cannot be attending school. Since fetching water is seen as women’s work, this means that girls are frequently denied schooling in societies where their gender already disadvantages them.

World In Need is working to ensure that people are able to access clean water as close as possible to their homes, thus cutting the need for heavy and health-risking lifting, and enabling girls to go to school.