Things that make me feel like an asshole (Via Matt Holt):
More than 2.6 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world's population, lack basic sanitation, and more than one billion people lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of all illness in the world is due to water-borne diseases, and that at any given time, around half of the people in the developing world are suffering from diseases associated with inadequate water or sanitation, which kill around five million people a year.
Widespread illness also makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. One of the main reasons girls do not go to school in many parts of the developing world is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells.
Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.
I guess I generally use a Britta, but damn. For a quarter of what we spend on "fancier" water, the whole world could have access to clean supplies? Has anybody told the President!?
Things like ending world poverty always seem a little ambitious considering the byzantine nature of poor, corrupt, governments, but couldn't the US net some majorly impressive press by committing $10 billion to bringing every man, woman and child on earth clean water? And wouldn't such a tangible project be strikingly more effective in winning hearts and minds and giving ordinary citizens a tangible counterargument to those who'd demonize our country?
