Procter and Gamble (P&G) has reiterated its commitment to save one life every hour in the developing world by delivering more than 2billion liters of clean drinking water every year by 2020 to help save an estimated 10,000 lives and prevent 80 million days of diarrheal illness on an annual basis.
Statistics from World Health organization (WHO) indicates that over 1billion people lack access to clean drinking water and approximately 1,600 children die daily from complications resulting from water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea, typhoid, cholera, dysentery and fever. This staggering figure is more than that from HIV/AIDS and malaria combined.
The company initiated a program dubbed Children’s Safe Drinking Water (CSDW) in 2004 through its water purifying technology that cleans and purifies water as well as stops the water from re-contamination. This is done using a simple sachet known as P&G Purifier of Water (previously Pur) which uses the technology that is in municipal water treatments.
In Kenya, P&G runs the programs mostly in Nyanza , Western and Coast provinces where there is adequate water which is however not clean. So far, the company has distributed approximately 70 million sachets which in turn has helped provide 700 million liters of clean drinking water in Kenya since the program begun.
The Program which works with over 140 partners across the globe in over 75 countries provides clean water to people in need through outreach programs for mothers in health clinics as well as students in school. It also responds to emergencies including cholera outbreaks, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters.
The cleaning water process involves adding the four grams of powder found in P&G purifier of water sachet to ten litres of turbid water. The product visually cleans the water removing pathogenic microorganisms, viruses, parasites and suspended matter from the contaminated water, leaving it safe for families to drink. It removes more than 99.99999% of common waterborne bacteria helping to reduce diarrheal disease incidence in the developing world.
P&G communications Manager Irene Mwathi, said safe drinking water and sanitation is a huge challenge to humanity due to high levels of poverty in the developing world. “Clean water is a basic need for human life and one of the millennium development goals that Kenya is striving to achieve, we are therefore glad to share a solution towards mitigating this problem,” she added.
