Nobody reading this started the day with a 3km hike to collect the family's daily water supply from a stream. None of us will suffer the indignity of using a plastic bag for a toilet. And our children don't die for want of a glass of clean water.
Perhaps that's why we have such a narrow view of what constitutes a "water crisis." Dwindling reservoirs and a few ministerial exhortations to flush the toilet less often, and we've got a national emergency on our hands. Hold the front page, there could be a hosepipe ban in the Home Counties.
In the next 24 hours diarrhea caused by unclean water and poor sanitation will claim the lives of 4,000 children. The annual death toll from this relentless catastrophe is larger than the population of Birmingham. Dirty water poses a greater threat to human life than war or terrorism. Yet it barely registers on the radar of public debate in rich countries.
At any one time, close to half the population of the developing world is suffering from water-related diseases. These rob people of their health, destroy their livelihoods and undermine education potential. The statistics behind the crisis make for grim reading. In the midst of an increasingly prosperous global economy, 2.6 billion people still have no access to even the most rudimentary latrine.
Over 1 billion have no source of drinking water.
In Britain, the average person uses 160 liters of clean water each day. In rural Mozambique or Ethiopia, people use what women and young girls can carry back from rivers and lakes: around 5 to 10 liters a day for each person. The iconic image of a woman carrying water belies a more brutal reality. You try carrying a 20-liter bucket of water for 6km in the baking sun.
The global sanitation gap is even more overwhelming. Those who have seen The Constant Gardner will recall the Kenyan slum visited by Rachel Weisz's character.
The slum was Kibera. With a population of 750,000 it is one of the largest informal settlements in Africa and accounts for one-quarter of people living in Nairobi. Over 90 percent lack access to a latrine, giving rise to a phenomenon that didn't figure in the movie: the "flying toilet." Lacking any alternative, people defecate into plastic bags that are thrown into the street, with terrifying consequences for public health.
Kibera is a microcosm of what happens across the developing world. Rapid urbanization and a crumbling water and sanitation infrastructure in cities like Jakarta, Manila and Lagos have left millions of poor people in overcrowded slums facing a constant threat from water infected with human excrement.
To add insult, the poor pay more for their water than the rich. In Kibera, you pay three times more than in Manhattan or London, and 10 times more than in high-income suburbs of Nairobi. Similar patterns are repeated across the cities of the developing world. The reason: water utilities pump subsidized water to well-off customers, but seldom reach the poor. Most slum dwellers face a choice between buying water from high-cost private traders, or taking a long trip to the nearest stream.
Meeting the UN's millennium development goal of halving the proportion of the world without access to clean water would cost US$4 billion a year for 10 years. That amount represents just a month's spending on bottled mineral water in Europe and the US.
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