1.1 Billion People Don’t Have Access to Safe Water

2.6 Billion People Don’t Have Access to Sanitation

Every year, over 1.8 million children die from diarrhea and other diseases caused by contaminated water and poor sanitation. Water-related illness is a huge barrier to progress in health, education, and economic growth. Women and children spend large amounts of time fetching water far from their homes. Sick and malnourished children miss school and learning opportunities, while parents forgo income generation in order to care for them.  The poorest of the poor are not able to achieve better livelihoods if their basic needs are not met.

Insufficient global progress towards the Millennium Development Goal to halve the number of people without access to safe water and sanitation by 2015 calls for key questions such as the following to be asked and investigated:

1. How does one determine which small-scale water treatment technologies and sanitation methods are appropriate for a specific community?
2. How do social marketing methods and education strategies affect adoption, willingness to pay, and sustainable use of safe water technologies?
3. What are the long-term health and economic effects of water and sanitation interventions in developing countries?
4. How does one disseminate and scale up successful safe water technologies?

The vision of the Blum Pilot Initiative on Safe Water and Sanitation is for UC Berkeley to tackle such critical research questions and to become a global center of expertise in low-cost technologies and interventions that improve access to safe water and sanitation in poor countries. Current faculty and student led projects are designing new and appropriate technologies for water disinfection at the point-of-use (POU), developing marketing and implementation models for their sustainable dissemination, and creating rigorous evaluation methodologies, education materials, and needs assessment tools.