Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene

Climate change heavily affects the water cycle through increasing frequency, severity of floods and droughts and increasing rainfall variability. Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that causes cholera, is not only a threat during floods, but also thrives during periods with little rain and hot temperatures. Transferred via person-to-person contact, contaminated water and food. During times of low precipitation and high temperatures, the concentration of the bacteria in the water increases, making the disease more dangerous.

In Pakistan, about 60% of urban and 40% to 100% of rural water sources are unfit for consumption. Studies have reported high contamination of water samples with total coliforms and E. coli. This results in about 100 million diarrheal cases, and 2.5 million deaths due to endemic diarrheal disease annually. The situation gets worse in disasters which often leave thousands of affected people, especially women and children in need of water and sanitation support.

Les récipients en plastique utilisés par les populations rurales au Maroc et en Afrique subsaharienne pour la collecte, le transport et le stockage de l’eau à boire sont souvent impliqués dans la contamination de l’eau collectée à cause de biofilms microbiens formés sur les parois internes de ces récipients. Ces biofilms forment une multicouche poly-microbienne de micro-organismes pathogènes.

This project is addressing direct and indirect health issues caused by drought in Kapoeta East County, the direct effect of drought is access to safe and clean water, almost all seasonal stream dried-up in locations and many existing hand pump got broken due to over population, Community travelling for 6 hours in search of water, most hours spent for fetching water.

Ocean and river water quality in Nosara is suffering due to increasing development and inadequate residential and commercial wastewater treatment. In 2019, WCA started weekly water quality monitoring for bacterial indicators at 3 local sites. Some sites failed to pass water quality standards most of the year, meanwhile WCA was recording more illnesses related to water contact recreation at beaches and in the river. The community was also experiencing increasing toxic algal bloom events and high nutrient loads which, due to work done by WCA, have been traced directly to local sources (i.e.

In Kenya, the frequency and intensity of droughts have increased, which is putting a strain on the country's food supply. This is particularly concerning in the arid and semi-arid regions of the country, where the majority of the population relies on agriculture for their livelihoods. Malnutrition is a major public health concern in low-income and food-insecure communities. The WFP has acknowledged that the food distribution network is fragmented and inefficient, which can make it difficult to get food to the people who need it.

Access to clean and safe water is a major issue worldwide. UNICEF reports that daily, over 700 children under 5 die from water-borne diseases linked to inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene. Africa is especially impacted, with 1 in 3 citizens facing water scarcity. Many people in sub-Saharan Africa lack basic drinking water, often having to travel for 30 minutes to access it. Hand Pump boreholes have become crucial for rural water supply in Africa, serving 25% of the population but still, a significant gap remains.

Water scarcity around the globe has been greatly exacerbated by climate change. This situation is particularly bad in Rwanda, where severe drought has been combined with extreme rain and floods in recent years. In most rural parts of the country, clean water is not available. This lack of access to clean water is the main cause of illness and diseases. Over 85% of diseases treated at Health Posts in rural areas are water-borne diseases. Rural citizens' only choice is to fetch and use untreated water from rivers or rain for drinking and cooking.

The problem, according to reports of https://www.wateraid.org/where-we-work/uganda, 21 million people out of a growing population of 45 million, do not have access to clean and safe water, let alone credible water infrastructure to access the small available piped water.

Yogesh Hooda of the Child Health Research Foundation in Bangladesh will use AI-based tools to teach low- and middle-income scientists to perform modeling and prediction studies in public health, which are dominated by researchers in the Global North. The codes generated during modeling studies are not often shared amongst researchers, making the methods difficult to learn. They found that ChatGPT could produce a code using a published model in just three weeks with only a beginner-level programmer and a biostatistician.