May 03, 2004

By: Andre Walles
Website: http://www.water-purification-filters.com

CARE Partners With USAID and Others to Promote Safe Drinking Water

A strategic public-private collaboration devoted to ensuring safe drinking water was officially launched today at the United Nations' Commission on Sustainable Development meeting in New York. The Safe Drinking Water Alliance includes CARE, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs, Population Services International, and Procter & Gamble.

The group will receive $1.4 million over the next 18 months from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Global Development Alliance, designed to promote partnerships such as this in the developing world.

USAID's financial contribution leverages substantial in-kind and financial contributions from Procter & Gamble (estimated at approximately $3.5 million), as well as technical and program support resources from other partners. The alliance is designed to develop innovative approaches to ensure the safety of drinking water.

Alliance members joined forces to offer their respective expertise and resources to better understand the behaviors and motivations for choosing particular technologies for treating household water, to share the knowledge gained, and identify opportunities for scaling up successful efforts to ensure safe drinking water.

We are delighted to support the Safe Drinking Water Alliance to help make water safe in Haiti, Pakistan, and elsewhere, said Holly Wise, director of USAID's Global Development Alliance (GDA). This unique public-private partnership pools resources to attack a problem responsible for the death of an estimated 5,000 children per day around the globe, and USAID is proud to be a contributing partner.

About 1.1 billion people around the globe lack access to an improved water source, and even for those who do, unsanitary handling and storage means household water for drinking and food preparation is often unsafe. Unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene practices cause the vast majority of diarrheal diseases, a leading killer of children under 5 that accounts for approximately 2 million child deaths every year. Waterborne infections such as cholera, typhoid fever, and dysentery also burden the public health system and impose significant economic loss.

Low-cost solutions can dramatically improve the quality of existing household water used for drinking and cooking. Procter & Gamble has developed a new product, PuR, which purifies water using technology found to be effective in improving water quality and preventing disease at the household level in developing countries. Reductions of 30 to 50 percent in diarrheal disease have been documented using such point-of-use treatment approaches, with even higher reductions during epidemic waterborne disease outbreaks.

The alliance will test the acceptance of Procter & Gamble's water treatment product using different approaches tailored to country need. Using these technologies in combination with behavior change strategies will help ensure safe water practices are sustained over the long term.

Alliance members belong to the International Network to Promote Household Water Treatment and Safe Storage, a global network of more than 20 organizations that recognizes the potential for using low-cost water quality interventions to reduce the risk disease and death. The alliance will begin work in Pakistan, Haiti, and another to-be-determined country where an emergency limits access to safe drinking water. Additional News, see water filter.

Author Notes:

Andre Walles contributes and publishes news editorial to http://www.water-purification-filters.com.  Get educated on the benefits of water purification systems and different water filters available.