Sub Saharan Africa Research Paper

Relieving hunger in Africa has to begin with access to clean water. It may seem simple, but we forget that without access to a reliable source of water, food is hard to grow and even more difficult to preserve and prepare.

It takes huge amounts of water to grow food. Just think, globally we use 70% of our water sources for agriculture and irrigation, and only 10% on domestic uses.

Water is fundamental to relieving hunger in the developing world. 84% of people who don't have access to improved water, also live in rural areas, where they live principally through subsistence agriculture. Sometimes, areas that experience a lack of water suffer because of poor water management, but more often it is a relatively simple economic issue that can be

Another way that we see the urban-rural divide is in sanitation. While rural areas often have less access to sanitation facilities, in Sub-Saharan Africa the situation is very poor. Only 24% of the rural population, and 44% of the urban population have access to sanitation facilities. This means that less than one in three people in Sub-Saharan Africa have access to a proper toilet.

There is hope

A small investment in a clean, safe source of water can have a huge impact on both crop production and the nutrition of a community. In fact, one of the most encouraging things we find when we return to sites where wells have been installed is the many small gardens that have popped up all around.

When we ask communities what improvements they've seen as a result of clean water, many send us pictures of their crops - proud of the progress they've made.

Sometimes the technologies we fund specifically target increased crop production. For example, we fund weirs (subsurface sand dams) in very dry places where seasonal water flows can be captured and stored. The dams trap rainwater on the few rainy days of the year and over time, groundwater levels