Women and Water
Lack of clean water disproportionately affects women and children. Valuable hours of the day are consumed by the collecting water and this can often mean that children miss out on education. We want to highlight this as a women’s issue but also as a children’s rights and educational issue too.
What’s the Issue?
- 40 billion working hours are lost each year to collecting water.
- The burden of having no access to water falls most heavily on women.
- Hours spent collecting water is hours not doing essential domestic chores or generating income.
- Terrifyingly, walking long distances, sometimes alone, means that women and girls are vulnerable to attack.
- Children miss out on education as either they spend their time collecting water rather than being in school, or they are forced to stay at home and care for younger siblings or take care of chores whilst their mothers undertake the task of collecting water.
How Will We Achieve This?
By using this calculator people can work out how much of their annual salary would be lost if they, like many women and girls in Africa, had to spend five hours a day collecting water.
We want to know how people’s lifestyles would change so we can try and measure the real cost of water.
So far 431 people have taken part in the calculator which was installed in March 09, and there has been a cumulative loss of over £700 million. We are not interested in what people’s salaries are in the first place but how much is lost; highlighting the impact this issue would have on people’s lives here, as it does to those affected in Africa. According to UN estimates there are over 922 million people living in Africa, we want to get the calculator to reach over £922 million pounds and use this as a campaign and media tool/pitch.
Quotes
Think of how you spend five hours of your day - watching television, meeting friends, eating out, going to the gym or in your workplace. Then imagine instead that those five hours were spent trekking through parched land to find and carry water to survive. Each and every day. That is the reality for many women.
A Pump Aid Elephant pump delivers so much more than clean water and better health. It gives women the luxury of time for themselves, time to become educated, time to learn new skills that can provide them with an income and get them off the relentless cycle of poverty.
Corinne Bailey Rae, Pump Aid Ambassador
It’s really made me think how much I take water for granted. I have a bottle of water on my desk because I can’t be bothered to go to the kitchen to get a drink, never mind trekking 5 hours to provide water for my whole family. If I had to spend that much time collecting water it would be goodbye to pretty shoes and nights out – I’d seriously struggle to make ends meet.
Liz Dobson, Pump Aid Supporter
So I did this, and my new salary is actually less than my yearly rent, so I could have a home, but not eat or travel to work. In order to live on this salary, I would have to move into a house which was around £100 a month, and spend £30 a month on food. I could never take the tube, nor get my hair cut. It would also take me six months to save for a ticket to Scotland for Christmas. Oh, and goodbye wine!
Juliet Stevenson, Television and Film Actress
Action
- According to UN estimates there are over 922 million people living in Africa, we want to get the calculator to reach over £922 million pounds lost and use this as a campaign and media tool/pitch.
- Calculate how much clean drinking water would cost you
How much would clean drinking water cost you?
To see how much money you would lose enter your annual salary.
