Water.

There are periods of time in which I seem to get a little blog-happy. This is apparently one of those times.

But I had to do a post on one of the cooler ideas that I’ve seen for a nonprofit.

I’ve been following their newsletters for a while. It’s called water.org.

And I just found out today that it was Matt Damon who started it.

I love celebrities who do more with their status than get DUIs.

Anyway…

I’ve mentioned kiva.org in another post. It’s where you loan money to entrepreneurs in developing countries and they pay back the loan. Then you can reloan your money to new entrepreneurs. So far, we’ve loaned to people in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Nigeria, Indonesia and the USA…and we’ve been paid back 100% which enables us to reinvest in new entrepreneurs.

I think one of the biggest roadblocks to charitable giving is the fear that it’s going to be wasted. And to be honest, every time I give money to a random beggar on the road, I feel stupid, like I just got scammed. (I feel the same way every time I pay taxes.)

That’s why I like kiva.org, and that’s why this charity is pretty cool. It’s called water microlending.

Cities/communities are given a loan to build a well or renewable water resource. They are expected to pay it back. The way they can pay it back is because they have so much more time on their hands now that they don’t have to spend several hours a day fetching water, and they aren’t getting ill as often, so they can work and produce more. When they pay it back, the money is reloaned to a new destination. Amazing idea, eh?

 

At any given time, half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from diseases associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

Almost one-tenth of the global disease burden could be prevented by improving water supply, sanitation, hygiene and management of water resources. Such improvements reduce child mortality and improve health and nutritional status in a sustainable way.

Every 20 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease.

In just one day, more than 200 million hours of women’s time is consumed for the most basic of human needs — collecting water for domestic use. This lost productivity is greater than the combined number of hours worked in a week by employees at Wal*Mart, United Parcel Service, McDonald’s, IBM, Target, and Kroger.