Water

I am writing my PhD on the right to water. For some reason, this means that it is topic that I rarely blog about - I guess because it seems that if I were to start, I would have no idea when and how to stop.

However, this is one of the quotes that I am using to start a chapter, and it is really resonating with me today, so I thought that I would share it:

Water consumption has almost doubled in the last fifty years. A child born in the developed world consumes thirty to fifty times the water resources of one in the developing world.* Meanwhile, water quality continues to worsen. The number of people dying from diarrhoeal diseases is equivalent to twenty fully-loaded jumbo jets crashing every day, with no survivors.**

Imagine if twenty fully-loaded jumbo jets were crashing every day, with no survivors. It would definitely make the news. If they were Western people, we would also definitely be doing something about it. We would really really care.

I know that it is not so much that we are devoid of compassion for what is happening in the global south. I know that it is more that the problems seem too huge and our ability to do anything about them seems so intangible (almost like conflict in the Middle East), and so we turn away to avoid feeling permanently depressed about the state of the world.

But the thing that gets me is that this issue really isn't that complicated (or that expensive). We know how to purify water, and we know how to install water pumps and dig decent wells, and it would save so many lives (not to mention the additional health and economic benefits from freeing people - usually women - from the hours of daily labour involved in collecting water from far away impure sources).

OK, minor rant over. I'll go back to my case study on South Africa.

*United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), State of the World's Population 2001, (New York 2002).
**World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP), The First UN World Water Development Report: Water for People, Water for Life, (2003), p.5.