Sustainability is achievable, as demonstrated during a recent trip to WaterAid programmes in drought-prone Konso, Ethiopia, where there are some exciting and innovative projects in place that are making real progress in overcoming the challenges in ensuring a lasting access to clean water.
Across the world, 1 in 3 women risk shame, disease, harassment and even attack because they have nowhere safe to go to the toilet. That's 1.25 billion women - daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers. Facing each day without access to this basic necessity is not just an inconvenience; it impacts on all aspects of life, and it is women and girls who suffer the most. Having nowhere safe to go to the toilet also means an increased risk of shame, harassment and even violence for women and girls when they are forced to go out in search of a private place to go to the toilet.
The key theme at this year's Stockholm World Water Week is water and food security: how do we meet the ever developing needs of a growing population with an increasing demand for resources?
Cholera is a word that fills the world's poorest people with dread, but if asked, the average person in the west would probably know little apart from what is gleaned from foreign correspondents reporting from hellish refugee camps.
This understanding that wider determinates of poverty have a big impact on the risks of mothers dying in childbirth is reinforced by evidence, not only from our own programmes but from scientific studies.
With Rio+20 on the immediate horizon, and a focus on water, energy and food, water will be an issue that world and business leaders are likely to find absorbed into their agendas - and rightly so.
This was the third time that WaterAid has been involved with the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, and we were delighted with the silver medal-winning garden that Patricia Thirion and Janet Honour created for us.
Cut through a wattle forest, the dirt track to Lupembe does not afford the visitor from Europe an easy ride. From the nearest main road, it's a three-...
The earth's resources can't sustain the hideous environmental impact of fast, cheap fashion. As our landfills reach capacity with our binned six-week-old Primark leggings, it feels very much to me like the healthy future of the environment is in the fibres in which we chose to clothe ourselves.
Rwanda, which suffered a brutal genocide in 1994, is the only Sub-Saharan African country on track with its Millennium Development Goal to halve the proportion of people lacking in water and sanitation services by 2015.
Accessible toilets enable disabled people to be independent and lead healthier more dignified lives. Simple adaptations can make a world of difference allowing a disabled person to use a latrine rather than needing to defecate in the open. An end to poor health and to debilitating diarrhoea.
But this World Toilet Day (19 November), there are 2.6 billion people across the world who have nowhere safe to go to the toilet. That's two out of five people for whom a toilet is an unimaginable luxury. Meanwhile, almost 900 million people are forced to risk their lives on a daily basis by drinking dirty water because they have no other option.
The crisis gripping the Horn of Africa continues to devastate families and communities. Twelve million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti...
