Talk:Drinking Water/Scarcity/Africa

Cut from Drinking water/Scarcity/Africa text
Can be used for move to article. Unmerged history to other article so far. Its better to rewrite, based on references used,. Merging will take a lot of mess over to the receiving article, unless the exact contributors to this text can be history merged.

Can be useful for Drinking water/Scarcity

 * As of 2006, one third of all nations suffered from clean water scarcity,

The Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation set up by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) defines safe drinking water as "water with microbial, chemical and physical characteristics that meets WHO guidelines or national standards on drinking water quality."
 * Water scarcity or lack of safe drinking water is one of the world's leading problems affecting more than 1.1 billion people globally, meaning that one in every six people lacks access to safe drinking water.

This often forces those living in water deprived regions to turn to unsafe water resources, which then contributes to the spread of waterborne diseases including malaria, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery and diarrhea, and can lead to diseases such as trachoma, plague, and typhus. Additionally, water scarcity causes many people to store water in their households, which increases the risk of household water contamination and incidents of malaria and dengue fever spread by mosquitos. These waterborne diseases are not usually found in developed countries because of sophisticated water treatment systems that filter and chlorinate water, but natural, untreated water sources often contain tiny disease-carrying worms and bacteria. Although many of these waterborne sicknesses are treatable and preventable, they are nonetheless one of the leading causes of disease and death in the world. Globally, 2.2 million people die each year from diarrhea-related disease, and at any given time fifty percent of all hospital beds in the world are occupied by patients suffering from water-related diseases.
 * With a complete lack of water, humans can on average only live up to 3 to 5 days.

Because addressing the issue of water is so integral to reaching the MDGs, one of the sub-goals includes halving the proportion of the globe’s population without sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015. In March 2012, the UN announced that this goal has been met almost four years in advance, suggesting that global efforts to reduce water scarcity are on a successful trend.
 * Efforts made by the United Nations with the Millennium Development Goals have targeted water scarcity globally. The compiled list includes eight international development goals, seven of which are directly impacted by water scarcity. Access to water affects poverty, food scarcity, educational attainment, social and economic capital of women, livelihood security, disease, and human and environmental health.

Additionally, in March 2012, Hillary Clinton announced the U.S. Water Partnership, which will bring together people from the private sector, the philanthropic community, non-governmental organizations, academics, experts, and the government in an attempt to look for system-wide solutions. The technologies and ability to tackle the issue of water scarcity and cleanliness are present, but it is highly a matter of accessibility. Thus, the partnership will aim at making these solutions available and obtainable at a local level.
 * As one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the United States plays an integral role in promoting solutions to aid with clean water scarcity. One of many efforts include USAID’s WASH- the WASH for Life partnership with the Gates Foundation- that works to promote water, sanitation, and hygiene. With this, the U.S. "will identify, test, and scale up evidence-based approaches for delivering these services to people in some of the poorest regions".

Can be useful for Drinking water/ new page
The filtration device is designed to eliminate waterborne diseases, and as a result provide safe drinking water for one person for one year.
 * Moving beyond sanitary waste disposal and pumps, clean water technology can now be found in the form of drinking straw filtration. Used as solution by Water Is Life, the straw is small, portable, and each $10.

All three designs are built to aid communities in drawing clean water from wells. The hand pump is the most basic and simple to repair, with replacement parts easily found. Using a more creative approach, Play Pumps combine child’s play with clean water extraction through the use of playground equipment, called a roundabout. The idea behind this is as children play on the roundabout, water will simultaneously be pumped from a reservoir tank to either toilets, hand-washing stations, or for drinking water. Alternatively, Elephant Pumps are just extremely simple hand water pumps. After a well is prepared, a rope-pump mechanism is installed that is easy to maintain, uses locally sourced parts, and can be up and running in the time span of about a week.
 * Other solutions to clean water scarcity issues have focused on innovative pump systems, including hand-pumps, Water for People’s “Play Pumps”, and Pump Aid’s “Elephant Pumps”.

Sidelight12''' Talk 05:55, 26 October 2012 (UTC)