Partnership for Change Supports WaterAid on World Water Day

The United Nations General Assembly designated 22 March of each year as the World Day for Water to draw international attention to the critical lack of clean, safe drinking water worldwide.

Water and sanitation are human rights, vital to reducing poverty around the world. Together with good hygiene these essential services are the building blocks for all other development - improving health, education and livelihoods. These basic human rights underpin health, education and livelihoods and form the first, essential step in overcoming poverty.

Partnership for Change (PFC) a non profit voluntary organization established by Chartered Environmentalist Declan Waugh to raise awareness on climate change, encourage adaptation and sustainable development are delighted to support World Water day by sponsoring the work of WaterAid, an international charity working in 17 countries including Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia in Africa; Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan in Asia; and Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste in the Pacific region.

When it comes to climate change, the world’s water crisis will be one of the most significant public health issues of this century. There are still almost 1.1 billion people without adequate access to water and 2.6 billion without adequate sanitation. As a consequence of climate change these numbers are expected to rise dramatically over the next two decades. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment report, forty percent or 3.5 billion of the worlds population may be living in countries with chronic water scarcity by 2025.

WaterAid is principally a development organisation, working with communities on long-term solutions to water and sanitation problems providing water, sanitation and hygiene education to some of the world's poorest people.

“5000 children die every day from diseases caused by unsafe water and sanitation; mainly from diarrhoeal diseases like cholera and dysentery. Yet all are easily prevented through water, sanitation and hygiene projects. In the year 2007/8 WaterAid and its partners helped more than 1.3 million people gain access to safe water and over three million people gain access to sanitation. PFC are delighted to support and raise awareness of the work of WaterAid” says Declan Waugh, “their projects have been targeted at the most vulnerable, with special emphasis placed on helping those groups who may be excluded from accessing water and sanitation on the basis of economic and social factors such as disability, ethnicity, religion, gender, age, social status or HIV/AIDS.”

WaterAid are the second development organisation to receive significant sponsorship from Partnership for Change this year. For further information on WaterAid view their website at http://www.wateraid.org or http://www.partnershipforchange.ie