Amid global conditions where approximately one in eight people do not have access to safe drinking water, International Medical Corps recently reinforced its efforts to build new components into programs that meet this most basic of human needs, including:

• leveraging the access and trust gained among Somali refugees in the Liben zone of Ethiopia through an existing nutritional support program to train hundreds of  community volunteers on how to promote better nutrition, hygiene, and sanitation behaviors, and to equip local Water and Sanitation Committee members with the technical expertise required to construct badly-needed pit latrines and refuse disposal sites.
• improving access to clean water for nearly 50,000 nomadic pastoralists in the remote, dry, northern district of Samburu, Kenya through a variety of activities such as establishing village water committees to manage and maintain wells, providing community water and hygiene education for family and schools, and constructing latrines for schools and families. Those working on the multi-year project have already rebuilt critical wells, protected a spring, built a water intake, and created school health clubs throughout the district.

Without clean water and sanitation, public health cannot be achieved. Nearly 900 million people do not have access to safe water sources and approximately 2.5 billion - 39 percent of the world’s population - do not have adequate sanitation services. As a result, 1.8 million people die every year from diarrheal diseases. Ninety-percent of these deaths are children under five years old.

International Medical Corps incorporates water and sanitation into our community-based programs so that public health is not only possible, but sustainable. We build wells, latrines, and large-scale water treatment and waste management systems while also addressing commonly neglected sanitation systems, such as medical waste infrastructure and management. International Medical Corps also prioritizes hygiene promotion and education in all of our water and sanitation work so that communities have the knowledge they need to better protect themselves from the threat of waterborne illness.