Water, Water Everywhere...

....but not a drop to drink.

This old rhyme would be cute if only it weren't true.

Over the past weekend I read three separate articles on water, appearing in Fast Company, Good, and the Sunday NYT Week in Review. It would appear that some people in the philanthropic communities are starting to realize that water safety and access lies at the heart of many other public health and development issues.

Don't have access to clean water? Then your wife or daughter can walk 4 hours roundtrip to collect it. If there's water to be collected. She can't start a small business to earn extra money, and she can't go to school because collecting water takes so much time. She might face assault on her way to the water source. But someone has to collect the water.

You walked 4 hours to collect water, so you don't want it wasted. So you don't wash your vegetables, or yourself, as often as you'd like because water is precious and your family needs it. You get skin problems; your child has diarrhea. Lots of children in your town have died from diarrhea--and you've seen worse caused by the water.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm doing some work for a water org now and learning more about all these issues that intersect with water. In a previous life and org we did work with water but in an emergency relief context. I have to admit it's shocking to see just how bad these issues are even in stable, if extremely poor, countries.

More to come...