Bitácora de Live Earth
Enviado por Live Earth el 21 December, 2009 - 12:02.
Every Monday we profile a Dow Live Earth Run for Water partner organization that works toward providing solutions to the nearly 1 billion people who lack access to clean, safe water. To donate to one of these projects, visit liveearth.org/give.
Project WET is an award-winning global non-profit organization celebrating its 25th year in 2009. Since its beginning, Project WET has dedicated itself to the mission of reaching and empowering children, parents, teachers and community members of the world with water education. Project WET achieves its mission by:
Enviado por Live Earth el 15 December, 2009 - 07:30.
A team of 5 drilling a well in Bolivia
If you want to make a borehole (the quickest way to make wells), you have two options. The first is hiring a big machine, which will arrive on a truck from the city, and gets the business done in a few hours. For at least $5,000 up to $20,000. Quick, easy, but far from cheap. The second is doing it by hand, using a manual drilling technology. It takes longer, it is heavy work, but it also gets the job done. For about $500. Now there is an interesting difference in price, don't you think?
Of course, manual drilling does not work everywhere. Clay, sand, and compacted sand are ok, but rock or large stones are not ok. But it just happens to be the case that hundreds of millions of people live in areas which have just the right soil types. One such country with the right soil type is Bolivia. It is home to two different manual drilling technologies, the EMAS method (which we will meet in one of the next blogs) and the Baptist method.
Enviado por Live Earth el 14 December, 2009 - 09:10.
Every Monday we profile a Dow Live Earth Run for Water partner organization that works toward providing solutions to the nearly 1 billion people who lack access to clean, safe water. To donate to one of these projects, visit liveearth.org/give.
For 20 years, Water.org has been empowering communities in Africa, Central America, and South Asia to meet their own water and sanitation needs. Co-founded in 2009 by Matt Damon and Gary White, Water.org is the result of a combination of WaterPartners, founded in 1990, and H20 Africa.
Enviado por Live Earth el 8 December, 2009 - 07:30.
Do you like chlorine? I do. Although I might not particularly like the taste of it, it is by far the easiest and cheapest way to disinfect water and make it drinkable, and it probably helped to save more lives than any other single chemical substance on Earth. Using simple techniques, it can be produced and sold locally in developing countries.
In the USA, chlorine began to be widely used as a disinfectant in the early 1900s, and it is credited with playing a key role in increasing Americans' life expectancy from 45 in the early 1900s to about 76 years at present, an increase of 50%. No more cholera, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Today, 98% of all drinking water purification in the USA uses chlorine. Very useful stuff to have around. So what about its use in developing countries?
Enviado por Live Earth el 1 December, 2009 - 12:35.
Every week we profile a Dow Live Earth Run for Water partner organization that works toward providing solutions to the nearly 1 billion people who lack access to clean, safe water. To donate to one of these projects, visit liveearth.org/give.
Fondo para la Paz is a non-profit organization that has worked for 15 years with rural indigenous villages in Mexico promoting community-led development and building social capital to improve their living conditions.
Enviado por Live Earth el 30 November, 2009 - 12:36.
Say you are a poor farmer in a rural area in a developing country. Then your best bet out of poverty is to make more money. From where? From the field. You need to grow stuff. And because growing things need water, you need access to water. Water is money.
One options is to wait for the rain. It is a stressful option, because the rain might come too late, it might not come at all, or it might come all at once, all of which are bad. The other options is to take control over the water you need. That means getting a pump. What kind of pump? One that is affordable, available, and repairable. Ergonomic, and easy to operate.
Enviado por Live Earth el 25 November, 2009 - 07:00.
David Kuria wants to transform the way Kenyans think about toilets. His company, Ecotact, is building bright, beautiful structures in dense urban centers and slums, where Kenyans can pay a small fee to use a hygienic toilet. A seemingly simple intervention but with potential for enormous impact in urban areas where defecating into a plastic bag is a common practice (e.g., the infamous "flying toilets" in the Kibera slum).
Enviado por Live Earth el 23 November, 2009 - 10:40.
Every Monday we profile a Dow Live Earth Run for Water partner organization that works toward providing solutions to the nearly 1 billion people who lack access to clean, safe water. To donate to one of these projects, visit liveearth.org/give.
Wasrag (the Water & Sanitation Rotarian Action Group) is a group of Rotarians who are dedicated to one of the aspirations of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals: to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.
Enviado por Live Earth el 10 November, 2009 - 01:39.
If you don't have a tap, washing your hands in a hygienic way isn't easy. You could place a bowl of water on a table, but then you would be washing your hands in the dirty water other people left behind. You could walk to the hand pump and ask somebody else to pump while you wash your hands. But that needs two people and wastes a lot of water. Can we do better?
A Tippy Tap used in Uganda.
Enter the Tippy Tap.
Enviado por Live Earth el 2 November, 2009 - 02:09.
Every Monday we profile a Dow Live Earth Run for Water partner organization that works toward providing solutions to the nearly 1 billion people who lack access to clean, safe water. To donate to one of these projects, visit liveearth.org/give.
A Child's Right (ACR) is unique in the water field as its sole focus is bringing clean, safe, purified drinking water to vulnerable children in impoverished urban and peri-urban centers – specifically to sites burdened with unsafe water quality and high concentrations of at-risk children. In the last three years alone, they have provided safe drinking water to more than 250,000 children in orphanages, street shelters, rescue homes, schools, displacement camps and children's hospitals in cities around the world.
