Water is life

While most of our bathing lakes are of drinking water quality and we even shower with drinking water, in many parts of the world people are searching for clean water every day or suffer from not having access to it. Millions of girls and young women in Africa are unable to attend school because they spend many hours a day collecting water and firewood to boil it. Especially in slum areas, diseases such as cholera, typhoid and salmonella transmitted by contaminated drinking water are killing people. Large corporations earn billions through the privatization and sale of water. So it is no wonder that it is often claimed that future wars will be fought over water.

Water already played a decisive role at the beginning of Austrian Doctors’ projects at the end of the 1980s. With some of his first donations, Dr. Werner Waldmann had wells built in the poor areas of Dhaka, Bangladesh, to give the needy population access to clean drinking water. A first important step towards better health. As a result, many of the infectious diseases that can be transmitted through contaminated water have been contained.

A good 35 years later, the topic of “water” is still a top priority in our project work. In the small Ethiopian town of Busa, around 95 km southwest of the capital Addis Ababa, we are currently constructing a water supply system for around 30,000 inhabitants. This important local project is being implemented together with “Menschen für Menschen”. A grant of € 300,000 from the state of Salzburg has made this possible. The local people are not only involved in the implementation of the project, but are also trained in the correct use of water through WASH (Water, Sanitation, Hygiene) training.

The solar-powered well built by Austrian Doctors at the Eroret Preparatory School in Kenya in 2023 will enable the school to grow a large proportion of its own food from now on. This gives the children the opportunity to receive practical training in agriculture. Our agricultural project at Eroret Preparatory School, in which the farmland is continuously irrigated by hoses, was launched this year.

However, water in the form of rain also often leads to disasters in our project countries. Think of the out-of-control monsoon rains that flooded the capital Dhaka and, of course, the poor settlements, depriving people of what little they have. Or the heavy rainfall in Kenya, which flooded large parts of the country at the beginning of the year. After years of drought, the soil was unable to absorb the masses of water, resulting in flooding. Countless livestock and some people drowned, fields and future crops were largely destroyed. So rain also destroys valuable farmland – in Kenya and Bangladesh. The effect of this: hunger!

As you can see, water plays a very important role in our project work. With material resources and your support, we have the opportunity to provide people with water, food and, above all, autonomy and health.