Keep up to date on all of our up and coming events, campaigning activity and find out how you can really get involved with our work.

Home     How we work     The Hard Facts

The Hard Facts

Over 884 million people in the developing world live without a safe supply of water, and more than 3 million people die every year from a lack of clean water supplies.

  • Unsafe water causes diseases such as cholera, typhoid and dysentery which in turn kill millions of people every year.
  • 40% of the world’s population suffer without a safe toilet, that’s 2.5 billion people.
  • More than half of hospital beds in Sub Saharan Africa are occupied by patients suffering from sanitation and water related diseases.
  • 4000 children die from these diseases every day – they're the biggest killer of young children, killing over five times more than HIV/AIDS and twice as many as malaria

 

If people do not have firewood or a paraffin stove with which to boil up drinking water to make it safe, they have no alternative but to give it to their children knowing it could make them seriously ill or even kill them. Using firewood to boil water brings further problems - deforestation which leads to soil erosion which means less fertile land to grow food.

Collecting water is usually the work of women and girls. This can take up valuable hours of the day and often means that children miss out on education. Hours spent collecting water is hours not doing essential domestic chores or generating income. Walking long distances, sometimes alone, means that women and girls are vulnerable to attack.

Water pumps provide a solution to this problem, delivering a supply of clean water pumped from the ground close to homesteads. However, many design of pumps are highly technical and when they breakdown often they require spare parts or repairs by a specialist that can be expensive and must be brought in from outside the community. The result of this is a water pump that can remain broken for up to several months and a return of the old problems.

Pump Aid has an innovative solution to this problem. The Elephant Pump, based on the Chinese rope pump design, is a cheap, effective and easily maintained way of providing water to a community. The Elephant pump is made with the help of the local communities and can be maintained and repaired by them. As a result, we almost never find an Elephant Pump not working.

Alongside the Elephant Pump, Pump Aid provides small gardens and trees which can be supported with water from the Pumps. This not only provides food and nutrition but can also be used to generate an income too.

With 2.5 billion people not having access to basic sanitation, Pump Aid has developed the Elephant Toilet in its field work to improve sanitation in poor rural communities. Inadequate sanitation can lead to a plethora of diseases and Pump Aid engages with local communities through hygiene education to address these problems. The Elephant Toilet is built using locally sourced materials, engaging communities and ensures that they benefit from a clean toilet solution.