How We Cure Hunger with Water

Water is essential in the battle against hunger. Most people consider food first when they think of taking action against hunger, but the very core of our nutrition programs also hinges on the availability of clean water. Our life-saving Therapeutic and Supplementary Feeding Centers, for example, must have access to safe water to ensure basic health and hygiene.

Whether you're drinking, cooking, or washing, contaminated water will make you ill, and the medical protocols in our Therapeutic Feeding Centers (TFCs) presuppose a clean water source. Providing access to water for our TFCs—no small feat in some places we work—is as central to addressing malnutrition as our nutrition programs themselves.

Another case in point: Action Against Hunger's uniquely restorative F-100 milk formula—the pivotal nourishment that we provide to victims of severe acute malnutrition—arrives at our Therapeutic Feeding Centers as a powder that must be mixed with clean water. Without access to clean drinking water, even our best tools could become vehicles for spreading disease. So whenever we assist malnourished beneficiaries in our nutrition programs, we must test for clean water nearby, and when we can't find it, we find ways to provide it.

Water in Emergency and Rehabilitation Settings

Action Against Hunger has developed a range of approaches for providing clean water during emergencies, often when entire communities have been displaced or left without access to fresh water. When responding to emergencies, we'll haul water in by truck until proper water systems can be built or restored. For example, we've undertaken extensive water trucking in post-earthquake Pakistan until the end of the Himalayan winter permits us to focus on rehabilitating water systems.

If displaced refugees have gathered in camps, they're usually located near a river or lake, and ACF's teams typically set up pumps and cleaning systems that bring potable water to everyone. And because refugees have typically lost everything, we provide them with jerricans (plastic containers) to collect and carry water to their family shelters. When access to a natural water source is difficult, our water-and-sanitation experts often equip refugee camps with water tanks whose capacities range from 10,000 to 90,000 liters depending on need. Regardless of the specific approach, our programs ensure that the water we provide is purified through chlorination or other water purification processes.

As with all of Action Against Hunger's activities, we're equally focused on the short-term and long-term needs of our beneficiaries. Our longer-term rehabilitation programs typically include water projects:

• We dig wells (sometimes deep, sometimes shallow) into which villagers lower buckets.
• We dig boreholes into underground aquifers from which water is drawn via pumps.
• We build artificial reservoirs ranging from tanks to large ponds that collect water from rain, from springs, or from other natural sources. (In fact, rainwater harvested in this fashion is the traditional water source in some of the communities we serve.)
• If a water source is far from a community that needs it, we sometimes construct networks of pipes that bring the water to more convenient cachements. (Even New York City gets its clean water from such a system.)

Water for Livelihoods

Water is essential for many livelihoods, regardless of whether a community has been displaced. Workers all over the world depend on routine access to water for tending crops, maintaining hygiene, caring for animals, and so on. When cyclical weather patterns or droughts disrupt a community's access to water, problems multiply.

The drought currently affecting northern Kenya, for example, has decimated up to 70% of livestock herds in some areas—a terrible loss for the communities whose lives and survival strategies depend on their livestock. Our water-and-sanitation programs in these areas, therefore, provide water for humans and animals—but of course, we segregate the outlets that animals use from the outlets intended for people in order to avoid contamination.

Water is also needed to irrigate crops. Only 17% of farmland worldwide is irrigated—but irrigated farmland produces 40% of the world's food supply. Introducing irrigation typically increases crop yield by 100% to 400%. We commonly rehabilitate existing irrigation systems that need repair, and sometimes install them from scratch.

Water and Sanitation

Water is also essential for basic sanitation: washing, cleaning, and flushing, so we also install systems for drainage and managing water flows, and we train communities to manage waste hygienically. Even the water that spills on the ground around a hand pump can potentially spread contamination, and systems must be in place to make sure that water points are protected from human contamination during collection.

To provide drainage for the latrines we construct, our teams sometimes install septic tanks, but more often we simply dig drainage pits—and then dig more as the pits become full. Sometimes we'll dig two pits for a single latrine. The first pit can take years to fill, but eventually the latrine's managers will switch to the other pit. While the second pit fills, the first pit's waste dries, and eventually its contents are dug out, treated, and used as fertilizer. Then, when the second pit fills, the procedure is repeated.

Skills for Self-Sufficiency in Water Management

Because our mission is to help communities become self-sufficient, we train local individuals and water committees to manage and maintain every system we install or rehabilitate so they can continue to have clean water and good sanitation after we've moved on. Working with local communities, ACF ensures that everyone is knowledgeable and invested in maintaining the structures we work to put in place. This helps ensure that ACF's programs have long-term value for the communities we serve.

Having clean water is so pivotally essential to a community's nutritional health that whenever we assist beneficiaries who lack clean water, we never wash our hands of the problem.