So we’ve been dormant for a little while and it seems every year about this time we come back – for an annual post! This year though we’ll be coming back for regular posts!
As you might have seen from our previous post, we’re passionate about seeing social concerns being elevated in the mass consciousness and today we wanted to highlight this very simple challenge – so you too can be a part of something novel and probably hard for those of us in societies where owning a smartphone seems like a right and not a privilege.
All you need to do is not touch your phone for 10mins and you earn someone 1 days worth of water through the UNICEF sponsor (Giorgio Armani – Aqua for Life). It is really that simple and to be honest, it’s probably a really great thing to do for your own mindfulness and respite from being connected 24/7 (something else I’ve been thinking about lately).
Some of the facts
“Across the globe, every day, 1,400 children die from diseases directly linked to unsafe water or a lack of basic sanitation facilities.”
“768 million people do not have access to safe, clean drinking water, and 2.5 billion people live without proper sanitation.”
I’ve read a few things that indicate you could probably go without food for at least a week and depending on your health and fitness probably closer to 20-40 days without dying, but just 3 days without water and you would die…pretty remarkable how essential clean water is to surviving. What’s sad is that clean water is relatively cheap to attain through basic purification methods. Yet so many communities don’t have access to these basic human right facilities, which lead to so many other issues such as cholera, diarrhoeal diseases (one of the leading killers in under 5 year olds in developing countries) and chronic disability (reducing productivity). These contribute to the cycle of poverty, through mortality and morbidity.
I noticed one of the info messages while the challenge was running on my phone – the record for New South Wales was only 1 hour! I think that should be fairly easy to break, so I’m going for at least 60 mins now! It’s already half way through, but I challenge anyone else to break that too.
Ant and Owl 