Imagine working in a nursery where water wasn’t available out of the tap.

Imagine a nursery that didn’t have any toilet facilities.

Imagine a world in which the water you gave to the children in your care had the power to make them ill, or even kill them.

Imagine a world in which children are denied an education because their day is spent collecting water.

I am sure that you find it quite hard to imagine a world in which all three of these ideas are present – yet this lack of water and sanitation is the reality for hundreds of thousands of people across the world today.

In fact, 1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to safe water, roughly one sixth of the world’s population.

2.4 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, roughly 2/5th of the worlds population.

WaterAid is striving to bring safe water, sanitation and hygiene to some of the world’s poorest people, concentrating on fifteen countries within Africa and Asia.

One of these countries is Malawi, a landlocked country in East Africa, ranking ranks amongst the world’s least developed countries. Currently, only 57% of the population have access to a piped water supply, with 90% of the population living in rural areas with precious little existing infrastructure.

The current poor water provision experienced by the Malawian population results in very high levels of water related disease – such as cholera and typhoid.

A lack of clean, safe local water impacts greatly on the lives of millions of children the world over.

In many of the world’s poorest countries the majority of children’s time is taken up collecting water for cooking and washing or taking animals long distances to drink. Children as young as 4 years old are included in the daily search for water, a search which may take them several kilometres under a relentless African sun. The water they are forced to collect may be little more than a puddle in the bottom of a dried out river bed, or a muddy seepage at the bottom of a hole several metres deep.

This water is, more often than not, blatantly unsafe for human consumption – containing many harmful, even fatal, bacteria. Water related diseases such as cholera, bilharzias and typhoid are all too common, as are infections such as scabies and hookworm and ringworm.

Click here to read about a case study on Scabies