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One in six people in the world lacks proper access to safe drinking water. On 10 November, the United Nations Development Programme and Publicis Italy are launching a campaign to make a lot more people in the world aware of that.
The international advertising drive, commencing in conjunction with the 9 November release of UNDP’s 2006 Human Development Report, “Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis,” aspires to garner support for universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Newspapers and magazines in the developed world are invited to join the water challenge by publishing free of charge the campaign’s four print ads, designed pro bono by the Milan-based agency of Publicis.
Many of the 1.1 billion people deprived of sufficient safe drinking water must make do with as little as five litres a day for all their drinking, washing and cooking needs---one-tenth of the average quantity that rich countries’ inhabitants flush daily down their toilets. Some 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation. In 2004, diarrhoea alone killed six times the number of people who died annually in armed conflict in the 1990s. And according to the Report, the US$10 billion investment required to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015 would generate US$38 billion a year in economic benefits.
The Human Development Report argues that poverty, power and inequalities, not scarcity, are at the roots of the problem, and proposes models of cooperation in water management. Click here to download and publish the ads.
