W.A.T.E.R.
212 Xanadu Road , #507
Wisconsin Dells, WI 53965
Phone: 608-253-0717
501C-3 Not for Profit
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Water In Africa |
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Africa (and especially rural Africa) has a wide variety of challenges which include disease, poor roads, limited education, poverty and others you already know about. But one that affects most all Africans on a daily basis is providing clean water. Each day, millions of Africans (mostly women) walk to collect their water and return to their homes with it one bucket at a time. In rural Africa it is rare for a house to have piped water available. Unfortunately, it is also usually the case that the water collected comes from a stream or stagnant water source.
NGO’s (Non Governmental Organizations), aid agencies and governments make attempts to provide water, but all too frequently these attempts are either to areas which are the most readily accessible, most populated, most politically desirable or easiest at which to find water. This means that thousands of villages are and continue to be excluded. Even in an oil rich country like Nigeria, there are hundreds of relatively small rural villages without any source of clean water. There are probably as many others at which a water system once existed, but which has not been maintained (hand-pump broken, submersible pump broken, etc.). In villages where a system is broken, getting leverage for dollars donated is easy, since the borehole or hand dug well already exists, and providing clean water can be as simple as repairing a hand-pump or buying a $500.00 submersible pump and installing.
W.A.T.E.R. focuses on rural villages with no or broken water systems. W.A.T.E.R. expends nearly all its resources in villages which are Guinea Worm endemic or formally endemic. Guinea Worm is a water-borne disease transmitted from person to person as a result of people drinking contaminated water from stagnant ponds. It has been targeted for eradication by the Carter Center and the Center For Disease Control (see either www.cartercenter.org or www.cdc.gov for more information), and today exists only in remote villages in Africa, mostly in Ghana, Sudan and Nigeria. Nearly all the work W.A.T.E.R. does is in these villages.
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