Tap into youth power to achieve the Millennium Development Goals

Sign up for the Clean Water campaign and support an entire community with clean drinking water

Former United Nations Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali once remarked, “The next war in the Near East will not be about politics, but over water.”

Why? Because every year a lack of clean water kills more than 1.8 million children across the globe. Waterborne diseases like typhoid and diarrhoea are some of the main effects of the lack of clean water.

And as the world warms up due to global warming, the limited sources we have dry up and even more people are forced to share less water, causing the supplies to get even dirtier.

Knowing how precious of a resource clean water is, it makes me angry when I hear that an additional investment of $11.3 billion (U.S.) annually—less than six days of global military spending—would be enough to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of providing basic drinking water and sanitation to all.

In effect, if our global family could make peace for just SIX DAYS we could prevent future water wars and the deaths of millions of kids.

Feel hopeless? At times, I do too.

But we, as young people, have the power to make change! Our generation of youth is the first in history that has the means—financial, economic, technological and educational—to completely clean up the dirty water issue forever.

So let’s get started! As everyday citizens we can do something about it now.

How can you make clean drinking water possible for everyone?

1. Don’t drink bottled water, instead try water from your taps. Let’s create solidarity with people whose basic right to clean, free water is not fulfilled by celebrating what we have and filling our reusable bottles with water before we go anywhere!

2. Turn off the tap and fix ones that leak to conserve what others don’t have. A tap leaking at one drop per second will waste more than 12,000 litres of water in a year.

3. Help support a clean water system overseas! Take the $1.25 you would normally spend on a bottle of water today and donate it to the Free The Children Clean Water campaign. If the average school of 400 students did that every day for one school year, they could build 15 wells!

Water is connected to poverty, sustainable development and health: all of the Millennium Development Goal themes. So let’s raise a glass (of water) to all that we can do for the world!

It’s as easy as turning on the tap.

Garrry Norman
Motivational Speaker

Find out how to support a community with a clean source of drinking water

Free The Children is the largest network of children helping children through education in the world, with more than one million youth involved in our innovative education and development programs in 45 countries. Founded by international child rights activist Craig Kielburger, Free The Children has an established track-record of success, with three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize and partnerships with the United Nations and Oprah’s Angel Network.