Happiness on Tap

Intro

Having access to clean water, as conventional as it sounds, is a serious challenge to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Water is one of the most, if not most, necessary resource in our daily lives--we need water to maintain our bodily health functions, to clean ourselves for sanitation, to operate machines for production, amongst many other uses required for our survival in the twenty-first century. While there are many problems associated with water, the underlying issue is not its scarcity--there is enough water for everyone--but rather, globally, there is a lack of sufficient means in allocating proper access to readily-available clean sources of water. With increasing competition for the limited access to clean water, it is not surprising that the rural poor lose out and are hit the hardest with water poverty. Not having clean water forces people to resort to using contaminated fluids for drinking, washing and working purposes. Many of the diseases affecting the poor like cholera, dysentery, leptospirosis, typhoid fever, and even SARS and hepatitis are water-borne illnesses--they are manifested in the transmittal of viruses from coming into contact with infected water. This on-going concern has been brought to the attention of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO), both of which are working extensively in developing countries to mitigate the depths of water poverty. Specifically, water supply and environmental sanitation and hygiene are the two entwined issues that must be tackled together. However, both are great problems of their own and require significant amounts of attention respectively--yet, there has been major progress for the former, as over the past two decades more than half of the world’s population lacking a clean water supply has been introduced to a reliable line of water. But still, over 780 million people lack access to a clean water supply, and even worse, around 2.4 billion people remain without improved...