Badukrom is a small village in the tropical rain-forest of the Western Region of Ghana, close to the popular mining town of Tarkwa.
One of its major challenges is that it has only one borehole serving the entire community numbering a few hundreds and when it breaks down those fortunate to have dug wells would depend on them for their water needs until the pump is serviced.
In the event that the well runs dry whilst the pump has not been serviced, the members of the community would have no choice than to rely on any water they can lay hands on.
The people of Badukrom, despite the tricky situation they find themselves in, may be considered lucky in that they at least for most part of the year are able to draw water from a functioning borehole pump.
Although water is an essential commodity, without which there will be no life on earth, many communities, both in Ghana and worldwide go through struggles each day, just to access their daily needs.
This commodity which holds the key to all life forms is getting scarcer each day, week, month and passing year and this continued scarcity has largely been attributed to mismanagement of the resource by man.
It is in view of this that the United Nations General Assembly in 1992, designated March 22 as World Water Day to raise public awareness about the dwindling resource, call attention to what is regarded as the world’s major health issue – the global scarcity of clean water and to promote the conservation and development of global water resources.
The Day is marked every year worldwide with a host of events and programmes.
According to the 2nd UN World Water Development Report, more than a billion people, who constitute almost one-fifth of the world’s population lack access to safe drinking water, while 40 percent lack access to basic sanitation.
In an interview with Larry West, About.com Guide, Gary White, Executive Director and co-founder of WaterPartners International, a non profit organisation committed to providing clean drinking water to communities in developing countries, said the global water crisis is the leading cause of death and disease in the world, taking the lives of more than 14,000 people each day, 11,000 of them children under age 5.
He said in addition to the health problems, women and girls spend more than 200 million hours every day walking to collect water from distant, often polluted sources—time that could be better spent on more productive endeavours such as work and school. “When you combine these factors, it’s clear that the global water crisis is the single biggest problem facing the world’s poor, preventing them from reaching even the first rung on the socioeconomic ladder,” he said.
Garry White continued that the leading cause of child death in the world is diarrhoea, with children under age five suffering 1.5 billion episodes of diarrhoea each year, four million of which are fatal. “Even for the children who survive, this chronic diarrhoea prevents them from thriving as they should. And for older girls, the responsibilities of carrying water are a leading cause of dropping out of school,” he stated.
Billions lack clean water
For its part, Earth Talk, a regular feature of E/The Environmental Magazine quotes the World Bank as saying as many as two billion people lack adequate sanitation facilities to protect them from water-borne disease, while a billion lack access to clean water altogether. It continues that according to the United Nations, which has declared 2005-2015 the “Water for Life” decade, 95 percent of the world’s cities still dump raw sewage into their water supplies, hence it should come as no surprise to know that 80 percent of all the health maladies in developing countries can be traced back to unsanitary water.
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