Why are 56% of people denied of a basic human right in Ethiopia?
Co-created with Arnav Shah
The average American family uses 1,136 litres of water per day. Despite the value of the resource, water is relatively expensive due to our abundant supply. When’s the last time you actually stressed out about not having enough water to drink? Chances are, the answer is never; not today, not this week, not this month, not even this year.
But if you fly half way around the world, you’ll see the billions of people who face the exact opposite problem. We casually consume, waste, and disregard this resource because simply put, we don’t have to think about what life would be like without it.
The truth is, no matter how much gratitude you have, you will never have the same appreciation as someone who experiences this problem every day. So let’s try to solve it. As is the case with most problems of this caliber, you can’t just throw a billion dollars at developing countries and expect the problem to be fixed. You need to target specific root causes that influence this outcome.
Ok then, so if this problem is so massive in scale, why is nobody working on it? Well, it turns out lots of people are. From the United Nations to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, many of the world's biggest organizations are focused on solving this problem.
Why hasn’t the entire crisis been solved with these types of companies leading? It’s because the world is a huge place — and investment/infrastructure is not split equally. This means that the root cause(s) of this problem are going to change drastically depending on factors like weather, economy, population, etc. There isn’t a one size fits all solution.
While most situations are unique, some are similar. Most of the afflicted developing nations are located in Sub-Saharan Africa. Countries like Eritrea, Angola, Uganda, etc. In fact based on worldvision.org’s list, 9 of the top 10 countries with the worst access to clean water are located in Sub-Saharan Africa.
But even this scale is far too large. The reality is, infrastructure and investment is still different between sub-saharan countries in Africa. For this reason, let’s look at it from an even smaller scope; say Ethiopia. This country alone amounts to 7.5% of the global water crisis and roughly 62/109 million Ethiopians are impacted by this problem.
The Impact
Note: From now on, every statement we make is for specifically Ethiophia and similar countries unless specified otherwise.
Globally, there are two abstract root causes: access, and quality of water. People need safe drinking water (quality) on premises (access).
A world ridded of the water crisis (for drinking specifically) is one in which people can consume as much clean water as they want (it’s interesting how most of you reading this already live in this ideal world). So what prevents us from achieving this reality? Let’s first understand these two root causes at a deeper level.
A Real Story
Stefanos has always lived in his brightly-painted home, passed down from generation to generation. Together with his grandparents, parents and his children, thirteen people share the home.
Stefano’s family does not have access to water or a toilet. Though a hard-working teacher, he can’t afford to pay for either all at once. Stefanos is well aware of the health risks and health expenses associated with not having safe water or a private toilet, but with his teaching wages, he can’t afford the whole cost to connect to the water utility or build a bathroom.
Imagine a teacher who can’t see his own kids to school each day because instead, they are off finding water, or worse, because they are sick from drinking unsafe water.
“Every parent wants their child to have a balanced diet, a safe home, and safe water. I have worked hard to give this to my children because I believe their education is important. School is the gift I can give them if I give them everything else.”
- Stefanos
Quality
When we take a look at the quality of water problem, the general idea is that the water is contaminated. Lower amounts of contamination in water will lead to water becoming more drinkable.
32 million people of the 62 million affected have the issue of unsafe water. The water is unsafe because there are lots of contaminants. So let’s break it down further, why and where does water get contaminated?
To answer that we have to look at the process that people go through to get water. By doing this we can then understand how contamination truly occurs by analyzing where/when the contaminants enter the water.
So what happens if water is contaminated? People can either drink it and get sick with diarrheal diseases (~ half-million deaths under-five children each year), or can simply just not drink the water. Either you get sick or don’t have enough water.
This contamination is mainly from pathogens. The most common by far is E. coli, a faecal coliform. In fact, it’s the standard unit of measurement which is compared against other coliforms when determining the severity of contamination in water.
Contamination accumulates throughout the supply chain. Attempting to prevent it at any step before the final one will be futile due to the next step recontaminating the water.
The reason why water is being contaminated at the storage and consumption stages is the same as the previous reason; because contamination accumulates throughout the supply chain. In general, all contaminated water can be traced back to unsanitary conditions. This includes everything from the environment, to the water storage devices, to their own hands. So obviously, that’s a huge infrastructural problem.
It would be nearly impossible to all of a sudden eliminate the existing contaminants in the environment and houses when you consider 23 million in Ethiphia practice open defecation. No wonder the water has fecael coliforms in it. Not to mention chemical, radiological, agricultural, and physical contamination.
Looking at specifically storage and consumption
The issue is that there’s contamination at every stage throughout the water gathering process. Therefore it only makes sense to look at the last one. But why storage and consumption?
Most contamination that accumulates during storage and consumption is the direct result of unsanitary conditions and a lack of education. Very few people understand how to properly treat water, and even less know how to store water post-treatment. ~95% of people use Jerry Cans to transport dirty water, but then end up just putting their newly treated water back into the same dirty cans for storage.
If the cups are contaminated, then nothing else matters - the water will always be contaminated. However, research indicates that storage adds a significant amount of contaminants that render water undrinkable in the first place. This is also the case because people leave their water in storage containers for long periods of time. As more and more time goes by, more and more contaminants enter the water.
Contaminated storage devices and drinking vessels combined make up the post-treatment contamination. Aka, the contamination that isn’t being dealt with because it happens after the treatment of the water.
During treatment, the CFU count consistently goes close to 0. If there was a way to eliminate all contamination in storage containers and consumption devices(cups), there would be no undrinkable water.
Access
When talking about access to water, the general idea is that freshwater is available - but people need improved access to it. This only applies if water is clean, because if we’re distributing more undrinkable water, more people will die.
The two main reasons people lack access to water is because 1) there is a huge demand for water in densely populated areas, and 2) existing technology to exploit aquifers is inefficient and poor in quality.
They both have the same root cause; overpopulation is progressively increasing the strain on an already failing water system. This is because of factors like droughts, contamination outbreaks, and other problems that would lead to these distribution methods becoming unusable.
“Ground water was available within aquifers, but could not be accessed because of problems with individual [distribution] sources”
- National Ground Water Association
32 million people need cleaner water, also known as a protected water source. So to understand why this problem hasn’t been solved yet, we have to look at what is currently being done and why these solutions aren’t the answer.
An overview of the two root causes:
Existing Solutions
We can categorize the important solutions into two buckets. One being the solutions that help solve the contamination of water, and the other being solutions that help increase exploitation efficiency and overcrowding.
Contamination Solutions
Solutions that solve contamination are trying to reduce the number of pathogens in the water.
SODIS(Solar Water and Disinfection)
SODIS is a method that uses UV rays from the sun to kill any pathogens found in water. Water is inserted into a plastic or glass bottle, put to rest for 6–48 hours, and drunk once the UV light has killed the bacteria.
There are roughly 5 million people that use this process every day in developing countries. However, it’s still one of the least used methods.
The main benefits that the method poses is the reduced cost and required skilled labour. There are a lot of solutions that require a whole list of skillful procedures that most uneducated people cannot perform, and SODIS aims to provide an alternative.
Despite these pros, there is still a long list of cons to go alongside it. Firstly, this process is at the mercy of nature. This method is unusable during cloudy days and the nighttime, as it depends on the UV rays of a bright, beating sun.
It also takes a long time to disinfect certain sources of water. Somatic phages take 3 hours, while other viruses can take up to 12.5 hours to fully destroy.
Additionally, it’s very unclear as to when the water is done being contaminated. There is no timer aside from the recommended amount, but that amount is dependant on the intensity of the UV rays.
In addition, it is recommended that solar disinfected water should be consumed within 24 h to avoid the possibility of post-exposure re-growth. This means storage is harder with this method.
Lastly, you are limited by the amount of water that your bottle can hold. That bottle also had to be plastic or glass and can’t be too thick. The overall idea is that a method like this has too many dependencies to be a solid solution for everyone that suffers from contaminated water.
However, there are extension methods to SODIS that aim to solve some of its problems. These are ways to increase the intensity of the sunlight or decrease the amount of time it takes to decontaminate. The main methods include placing filled bottles on reflective surfaces to boost the amount of sunlight absorbed. Painting the underside of the SODIS reactor black to enhance solar heating. And lastly, Filtering the water before filling the reactor.
However, just like the concept itself, this is all limited by factors such as the intensity of the sunlight.
Boiling
Boiling needs no introduction. With a staggering 1.2 billion people globally using this method, it is roughly 4 times more common than methods like chlorination and filtration and is easily the most used method in the world to decontaminate water.
Similarly to SODIS, boiling utilizes energy to destroy the bacteria in water.
“Overall, a comparison of paired water samples for each household showed a 2.1 log10 reduction (95% CI: 2.1–2.2) in fecal coliforms after treatment; this is equivalent to a 99% reduction in Fecal Coliforms.”
- The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
This is huge. As proven by multiple studies including the above, a method like boiling is extremely effective against pathogens and doesn’t require much skilled labour. So then the question begs itself, why isn’t this the perfect solution? There are two main reasons: cost and lack of education.
On average, boiling costs a whopping $1.25 per litre of water. This may not seem like a lot, but when the average income of a household is $3 per day, this is simply unfeasible.
As it would happen, most people are incapable of boiling water correctly. Although boiling theoretically has the ability to kill 99% of fecal coliforms, there is a massive delta in knowledge of how boiling works. In a study of 1760 women, only 2 boiled water properly.
Four of the 26 women stopped boiling their water once vapors appeared; the average temperature for this was 74.6°C; the remaining 22 women brought the water to a surface boil (100°C). Only two women continued to boil water once it reached a surface boil for 3 and 5 minutes each.
- The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
Access Solutions
A solution that is trying to solve access is one that is trying to solve something not infrastructural about access. Both increasing the number of distribution points and having lots of people in an area isn’t a solvable problem.
Realistically the only one that is solvable is inefficient water gathering methods to get water from sources like aquifers to distribution points like wells or taps.
Protected Springs
Springs are a result of overflowing aquifers. It has direct contact with the aquifers so it has an extremely abundant source to draw water on. This is one of it’s biggest pros, it can give water to a lot of people. A byproduct of its structure is it doesn’t require pumps to facilitate the water stream because the water naturally comes to the surface.
These factors are the reason that 44.1% of all used water sources are either protected or unprotected springs(the protection of any type of source means that it has adequate protection around it to limit the number of pathogens that can enter the water).
Lastly, protected sources can produce high-quality and abundant water. However, as we mentioned before, even if the water from the source is high quality, that doesn't mean it won’t get contaminated further on.
Unfortunately, there are several issues with this method of access. Firstly, because springs aren’t protected by some sort of dome, it’s extremely susceptible to natural disasters, more specifically long periods of droughts that would decrease the yield (this is a big deal for Ethiopia specifically).
Additionally, regular maintenance around the spring head is required to mitigate the pollution. Generally, all solutions lack in at least one of the major requirements for an ideal solution to its respective category (access or quality).
They’re either too expensive, don’t clean the water properly, are too complicated, take too much time, or are too circumstantial to be sustainable.
Here are some general solutions to both access and quality with their respective qualities:
Devalidating Quantity Of Water
There’s a lot of talk about how we need more clean water in general. It’s the idea that our current freshwater supply will run out extremely quickly and we need more to continue.
On top of the fact that contamination and access statistically make up the entire water crisis in Ethiopia and other places, we actually do have enough freshwater.
By doing the calculations based on total water available for the country divided by the number of people in Ethiopia. This corresponds to an average of 1,575 m³ of physically available water per person per year. This is actually above average.
What we can take away is that there is in fact enough water; it’s about how we distribute it (access) and ensure that the contamination is minimal (quality).
Addressing Contamination At Distribution
There is also a lot of statements that talk about how the root cause of the problem is the distribution points are unsanitary.
This is false. The data clearly shows that throughout the water gathering process, the distribution points have the least contamination. The above chart shows that and so does this:
In a study for improved sources, samples with E. coli counts less than 10 CFU/100ml were as follows: distribution: 165 (88%); in household storage 137 (59%); in drinking cups 91 (49%). The corresponding values for unimproved sources were: distribution 47 (29%); household storage 32 (19%); drinking cups 21 (18%).
This data shows that for both improved and unimproved sources, water contamination was lowest at distribution and progressively increased throughout the water process. At consumption, for improved sources, only 49% of water samples had lower than 10 CFU/100ml when it started at 88%, that’s a 39% decrease in quality from the distribution to consumption. This is direct evidence that most distribution points have a relatively low level of contamination.
Even if data like this was all false, it still wouldn’t matter. The reason is that even if you did try to stop contamination at the distribution level, it would still increase through processes like transportation or storage. Making all your efforts completely pointless because at the end of the day, post-treatment processes are the only ones that have a significant impact on the end result.
Imagine you lived in a country where if you didn’t have issues with water, your sister, brother or mother certainly would. In the developing world, it’s normal for half of the population to lack access to clean water. This is a fundamental breach of basic human rights.
Most people think of our world 100 years into the future expecting some technological dystopia. A world full of AI, VR, IoT, all the buzzwords. But what should be advocated for is a world in which everyone has the most basic human rights on the planet. If we deserve sufficient access to safe drinking water, why shouldn’t they too?
TL;DR
- The water crisis is caused by 2 main root causes, access, and quality. Collectively these two root causes impact 62 million people in Ethiopia(~56% of the population).
- Regardless of the source water being clean or not, data shows that contamination accumulates. These types of variations of data, in general, don’t mean anything because the end results stay the same.
- Some people store their water and others don’t. However, those who store it have significant higher traces of contamination because storage containers are unsanitary and contamination accumlates over a long duration.
- Treatment of the water can significantly reduce contamination, but post-treatment contamination (done because of storage and consumption devices) recontaminates the water, leading to more people falling ill
- Existing methods work, but most aren’t used to solve storage and drinking vessel contamination. Depending on the method, they can be expensive, complicated, inefficient, circumstantial, or time-consuming. This is why people try to combine these solutions.
