Safe, clean and reliable access to water and sanitation services remains an urgent, global challenge, with more than 1 billion people lacking these basic services worldwide. As displacement becomes increasingly prevalent—more than 65 million people are displaced today—stopping the spread of water-related illnesses is a top priority for humanitarian organizations like International Medical Corps. Yet …
Alaa is a 14-year-old Syrian refugee who lives in a small village in the Bekaa Valley. When Alaa’s family came to Lebanon eight years ago, she was only six years old. Before fleeing the war, Alaa stopped going to school for a full year. Like so many other children, it wasn’t safe for her to …
In the scramble to contain a deadly Ebola outbreak spreading across Liberia and two neighboring West African counties with frightening speed in the late summer of 2014, an International Medical Corps emergency response team deployed quickly to confront the epidemic at its source. As our team raced to complete a hospital-like treatment center in central …
Unpredictable rainfall patterns across Somalia often result in drought and floods, leaving the population without access to safe drinking water. A quarter-century of war and conflict has left Somalia’s pre-war water infrastructure and once-expansive irrigation and canal systems in disrepair. With only two perennial rivers, Somalia’s agricultural riverine communities are increasingly affected by extremes of …
Imagine having to wait all day to defecate in the dark, just to get the tiniest semblance of privacy—and then getting raped because you went outside alone at night. Imagine carrying a 10-gallon jerry can of water on your head and walking three miles in the blistering heat to bring it home for your domestic …
I dreamt of becoming an engineer ever since I was a child growing up in Taiz, a city in southwestern Yemen. This dream drove me to study at Sana’a University, graduating with a degree in engineering in 2013—two years before the outbreak of a war that would irreversibly change the lives of Yemeni people. Driven …
In Ethiopia, roughly half of the population lives with no access to clean water. This shortage, combined with poor sanitation and hygiene practices, creates major challenges just to maintain existing levels of public health—let alone improve them. In hard-pressed rural areas, these challenges also erode the quality of primary and secondary education. Children frequently miss …
