How the PlayPump® water system is helping to achieve the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. 

• While health benefits are often thought of as the principal benefit from improved water supplies, there is an important link with livelihoods.  Providing water close to the home frees-up time for more productive activities, and far fewer school/workdays are lost due to ill health. 
• A water supply helps ensure a robust garden and healthier livestock in times of drought.  
• Community water supplies can also lead to income generation activities such as brick-making, etc.

2. Achieve universal primary education.  

• A water supply ensures that children, especially girls, are more able to attend and teachers more willing to work at a school with such basic facilities. 
• Children that regularly suffer diarrhea and other water and sanitation-related diseases miss classes. 
• Children stay away from school because they are needed to carry out domestic chores or tend animals while their mothers are collecting water. 
• UNICEF estimates that more than half of the world’s schools lack drinking water, clean toilets, and hygiene lessons for school children. Safe water and sanitation are essential to protect children’s health and their ability to learn in school. 
• Children, particularly girls, are denied their right to an education because they are busy fetching water. Of the 120-million school-age children not in school, the majority are girls.

3. Promote gender equality and empower women.

• The burden and drudgery of collecting water is mostly borne by women and especially girls. 
• In underserved African communities, women often walk up to 6 miles each day to collect just one bucket of water.  Providing water close to home frees-up women’s time for more productive use, such as tending kitchen gardens or working in cottage industries. Income generation also leads to increased status for women. 
• Involving women in water projects is a direct means of empowerment. Not surprisingly women are highly motivated to ensure the success of water projects and participate fully in the planning of water facilities. They are often involved in the management and maintenance of community water systems.

4. Reduce child mortality.

• Diarrheal disease associated with water and sanitation leads to 2.1 million deaths each year — the majority of which are children. 
• It has been estimated that 5,000 children die every day from water and sanitation related diseases. 
• Children are most vulnerable to disease resulting from contaminated or inadequate quantities of water for drinking and personal hygiene. 
• Malnutrition, which is the most significant cause of immunodeficiency, is associated with about half of all child deaths. 
• Frequent bouts of diarrhea lead to further deterioration in nutritional status and ability to resist disease.

5. Improve maternal health.

• Carrying heavy loads of water leads to spinal deformation that can result in obstruction of the birth canal, putting both the mother’s and infant’s life at risk. 
• Anemia is common in pregnant African women, and it is exacerbated by the continued heavy work of water collection. This has the potential to impair fetal growth and adversely affects the quantity and quality of breast milk. It is not uncommon for pregnant women to continue collecting water until the day they give birth. 
• Good hygiene of expectant mothers and safe delivery spaces are impossible without an accessible source of water.

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases.

• Infected people are more vulnerable to opportunistic pathogens causing diarrhea and skin diseases, which can be controlled to some extent by safe water and sanitation. 
• Diarrhea is a major cause of morbidity for people living with HIV/AIDS.
• Water used for food security and improved nutrition also helps people to remain healthy. 
• Safe water is essential for ingesting any medications. 
• Less time spent on fetching water allows caregivers, who are usually women and girls, more time and energy for coping with the disease or for working outside the home. 
• In many of the countries in the world most affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, water and sanitation services are extremely limited. With the shift of focus from HIV/AIDS prevention efforts to treatment options, more attention must be given to improving water services.

7. Ensure Environmental Sustainability.

• Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources.
• Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
• Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020.

8. Develop a global partnership for development.

• Community water supply programs represent an entry point to the development of democratic society, leadership and good governance. 
• A water supply program can be the catalyst for this process because there is a need for the community to organize a representative management committee. 
• Building a water system involves the community in an enormous amount of decision-making, and this continues after project completion as the community assumes responsibility for the installation. 
• Very often a water supply project is the first time that a community must learn how to administer a communal utility. 
• There are a wide variety of new skills learned in this process including technical, managerial and leadership. 
• It is a confidence building experience for the community as a whole and often leads the community to undertake other projects entirely of its own initiative.