World Water Day
- The Probitas Foundation works to supply drinking water to part of the 2 billion inhabitants who still do not have access to it.
- The UN organises, for the first time in 50 years, the World Conference on Water.
World Water Day (March, the 22nd) was established in 1993 to raise awareness and seek solutions to a crisis that keeps 2 billion people without access to drinking water.
In 2015, the world committed through the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 to provide safe water and sanitation for everyone by 2030.
Right now, we are a long way from meeting that SDG by 2030 as billions of people and countless schools, businesses, health centers, farms and factories lack the clean water and toilets they need.
To accelerate this change and achieve the proposed goal, more action is needed. For this reason, this 2023, from the United Nations, a World Conference on Water has been organised, the first event of this type in nearly 50 years.
Access to water and sanitation is a fundamental pillar to achieve SDG 3 of health for all. Without water there is no health. There are many projects in which the Foundation has collaborated to facilitate this access to water, from well construction projects to the installation of water tanks in health centers. From the installation of solar pumps in wells to facilitate the work of women and children in communities to the construction of hygiene points in isolated areas to prevent infectious diseases in general and neglected tropical diseases in particular (NTDs).
The fight against these NTDs represents one of the Foundation's main lines of work, particularly with regard to their prevention. In this sense, the improvement of the situation of access of communities to water and sanitation is one of the most representative intervention sectors of our collaboration projects in ETD. This is how the WHO understands it in its strategy to combat NTDs, in which access to water and sanitation is the main axis of the fight to control these diseases.
Thus, among other projects carried out in recent years, the Foundation has collaborated in the construction of hygiene points in isolated communities in the Colombian Amazon or in the installation of water tanks in health centers in the Paraguayan Chaco. In the same way, we will soon start projects in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Sierra Leone in which the fight against NTDs involves improving access to water for the affected communities.
We are convinced that this access to water is a transversal tool that improves not only the control of the NTDs that we fight, but also the overall health of the communities in which we work and for which we work.