The Right to Water

Improving Access, Combating Disease and Mitigating Conflict

Water is essential for life, good health and economic development. Yet more than 1.1 billion people — about one in every five — lack access to clean, safe drinking water, or are embroiled in conflicts over its availability. Diseases caused by dirty water are responsible for 4,500 deaths each day of children under five. This global public health crisis hinders the ability to reduce poverty and stimulate economic growth.

The UN Millennium Development Goals call for reducing by half the number of people without access to clean water by 2015. Mercy Corps contributes to this end by offering solutions that include piping drinking water to rural communities, building wells and ensuring that people have access to drinking water in the aftermath of devastating emergencies. The agency also helps communities solve resource-based conflicts over water in our long-term programs.

Mercy Corps and Ethos Partnership: Success in Indonesia
Mercy Corps' Sumatra Healthy Schools Program in Indonesia is an integrated program that is assisting 230,000 elementary school children across four impoverished provinces. The program is helping ensure access to clean, drinkable water in 40 schools, as well as constructing or rehabilitating water and sanitation facilities in more than 500 schools.

Through the monetization and barter of non-fat dried milk from the US Department of Agriculture, Mercy Corps supplies a protein-rich soymilk alternative to non-nutritious "snack food" and instructs children, their parents and their teachers in health, nutrition and hygiene.

The substitution of soymilk for less nourishing food improves the nutritional status of children, while Mercy Corps' overall health training instruction increases access to healthier foods and reduces the prevalence of parasitic infection.

Building Wells: Combating Child Mortality
The growing world water crisis is especially acute in Liberia, a small West African nation struggling to recover from a 14-year civil war. Nearly 70 percent of Liberians drink dirty water from untreated wells, rivers, ponds, creeks and swamps. UNICEF names diarrhea and cholera as "two of the biggest child killers," with diarrhea responsible for nearly a quarter of all deaths of children under five.

Since 2003, Mercy Corps has partnered with dozens of villages in rural Liberia to dig wells that provide clean, potable water for thousands of families. The program builds the capacity of local organizations and communities to organize and spearhead community development and infrastructure projects.

Through these local partnerships, Mercy Corps helps create infrastructure such as latrines that provide better sanitation to village residents. This program helps the villages prioritize and complete vital water and sanitation projects, part of ongoing efforts to give Liberians the tools they need to build a more peaceful and prosperous future.

Promoting Water Savings and Efficiency
While it is currently one of the most stable countries in the Middle East, Jordan is also one of the ten most water-deprived countries in the world. This extreme water scarcity and increasing cost of supply is a serious challenge, particularly for rural households. Over the next two decades, a growing population, an uncertain regional political environment, and potentially dangerous climate changes are expected to exacerbate Jordan's existing water shortages.

Mercy Corps is responding to Jordan's water crisis by distributing grants to 120 community-based organizations. These local organizations then distribute that money as revolving loans to fund water saving and efficiency projects, such as introducing more effective irrigation techniques, installing rainwater-harvesting cisterns to store drinking water, and helping sheep and goat breeders more efficiently water their stock.

Providing Clean Water Amid Conflict
In the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, renewed fighting has driven some 1.2 million people from their homes, including more than 800,000 people from North Kivu province alone. The United Nations reports that cholera has reached epidemic proportions in the poverty-stricken country.

Mercy Corps is helping displaced families and host communities in North Kivu. We have partnered with UNICEF to rehabilitate water supplies for 87,000 people and improve hygiene and sanitation to prevent further outbreaks of water-borne diseases. Mercy Corps also employs locals in rebuilding efforts, thus increasing community empowerment and helping to stimulate the Congolese economy.

Water Conservation Benefiting Families
The Blue Mountain National Park in Honduras, managed and protected since 1992 by Mercy Corps with local partner Proyecto Aldea Global, conserves a vital watershed that provides clean water to thousands of area families. In the small community of Los Pinos, villagers once had to rely on often-contaminated local water holes for drinking water. Mercy Corps installed a six mile pipe system to bring water from the mountains down to residents. Clean water is now plentiful and available in more than one hundred homes, and the park itself irrigates 20 acres of commercial farmland. Local residents have also greatly benefited from reduced incidences of waterborne illnesses.