Government says it is spending a lot of money on treating diseases that can be prevented by providing clean water and habitable sanitation.
Western Province minister Richard Kapita says, government’s agenda is to ensure that people in every corner of the country have access to clean and safe water.
Mr. Kapita says clean drinking water and sanitation are a key component to attaining a healthy and productive nation.
Mr. Kapita said this in a speech read on his behalf by Western Province assistant permanent secretary Betrice Muyambango during the commissioning of the Mangango water supply scheme in the integration resettlement scheme.
He said government alone cannot entirely provide everything to citizens hence the need to work with other stakeholders like the Japanese government in improving water challenges and addressing other needy areas of the economy like education and health.
And Japanese Ambassador to Zambia Hidenobu Sobashima said the Japanese government has put in more than One million kwacha to ensure that the Mangango water project is completed.
Mr Sobashima said the Japanese government will continue supplementing government’s efforts in improving the lives of the people across the country.
And United Nations High Commission for Refugees information and publicity manager Kelvin Shimo thanked the Japanese government for the water project which he said will help prevent waterborne diseases in the resettlement scheme.

India has the maximum number of people, 63 million, living in rural areas without access to clean water, according to a new global report released to mark World Water Day in 2017 Water is a scarce resource and an important basic necessity for the human survival.
Though water available in nature is free, sizeable investment and planning is needed in order to make water available to people in the desired quality and quantity on a consistent basis.
India has the maximum number of people, 63 million, living in rural areas without access to clean water, according to a new global report released to mark World Water Day in 2017.
According to World Resources Institute (WRI), over 100 million people in India are living in areas where water is severely polluted.
Lack of safe drinking water poses many health hazards such as diarrhea, cholera, and typhoid which have seen millions of registered cases during the past 3 years.
One such private sector initiative is JanaJal, who install and operate safe drinking water ATMs in India.
JanaJal is an integral part of the Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat Campaign and through support from NGOs, Charitable Foundations and Corporates have implemented some landmark award-winning community drinking water projects in the country.
A majority (71 per cent) of Indians said that safe drinking water had improved over the last five years.
62 per cent of the Indians believed that the government was doing enough to support access to safe drinking water.
While a lot remains to be done, it is imperative that the government agencies collaborate with private sector companies to be able to deliver sustainable projects on ground that can deliver this precious resource to people in a consistent and affordable manner.

Decades ago, environmental activists found that minority communities are disproportionately impacted by pollution and water insecurity, and the continuation of the environmental justice movement shows that this negligence is an ongoing issue.
Despite protests, lawsuits and scientific studies to back up residents’ concerns, the soil was dumped into the landfill.
Warren County’s experience with pollution simply confirmed what minority communities already knew: the government neglects its minority communities and sometimes knowingly pollutes these areas.
Standing Rock residents must now wonder every day if their main water source will be contaminated by the pipeline.
In Warren County’s case, the town in which the landfill resided did not have a mayor or a city council, so residents were left to fend for themselves.
Cape Town is on its way to becoming the first major city to run out of water due to years of droughts and neglect by the federal government.
As early as 2015, local leaders promptly informed the national government that they would need to increase water supplies, but the dams were still 75 percent full at the time and their proposals were rejected.
Without the Clean Water Rule, minority communities will be the first to be affected as they battle pollution-fueled water insecurity.
Some communities, however, do suffer mainly because of government inaction, and these issues must also be alleviated.
Government officials should treat each community equitably and take everyone’s concerns seriously.

A letter sent this week from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to the city of Dayton sheds more light on how the two parties are addressing potential water contamination emanating from the base and a city-owned site.
To date, the Air Force has spent more than $4 million in remediation efforts that included hundreds of sampling analyses on the monitoring wells.
PFOS and PFOA are components of many industrial and commercial products, including a legacy firefighting foam used by the Air Force and civilian airports to combat petroleum-based fires associated with aircraft fires.
"We continue to share your concerns with water contaminated by legacy firefighting foam," McDonald wrote to Dayton City Manager Shelley Dickstein.
According to McDonald, test results showed contaminant levels ranging from 3.7 to 1,285 parts per trillion were detected at the site, which is well above the EPA limit of 70 ppt.
At the base, the city’s monitoring network samples indicated low levels of PFAS — less than 10 ppt — well below what the EPA considers to be a health issue.
were previously identified at two drinking water wells at the base.
"In as much as the Air Force has conducted preliminary assessment at all our installations, accessing your own use of Aqueous Film Forming Foam will be valuable in understanding your future actions."
Based on these results, the EPA determined Wright-Patt and the fire training center may be a source of contamination.
Despite the possible threat of contamination, the EPA, the city and the Air Force have all said Dayton’s drinking water remains safe for consumption.

“Sometimes two days went by and we would only have water for an hour,” said Dunia Rojas, who was elected the mayor of Arani, Bolivia, in 2015.
“Now we have water 24 hours a day, it’s clean and healthy water,” and every community in her district has a reliable source.
Water For People, a Denver-based nonprofit, helped Arani in central Bolivia, along with the Cuchumuela and San Pedro districts in the South American country, under its program called Everyone Forever to deliver drinking water and sanitation services to communities.
“Water is something that we take for granted here in the United States.
It’s difficult to imagine what our lives would be like if we didn’t have that service.” The group is an offshoot of the American Water Works Association, which focused on managing and treating water in the U.S. and Canada, explained Mark Duey, Water For People’s chief programs officer.
After receiving numerous requests for similar help in other countries, AWWA created Water For People in 1991 to handle those requests.
As it got started, the group was working on a project-by-project approach without much strategy, he said.
The partnership also requires monitoring the water and sanitation systems, done through an Android data-collection app called “Flow.” In 2017, San Pedro was the first district in Bolivia to achieve universal access, where every family, school and health center had adequate drinking water and sanitation facilities.
Behind the wall, a well is collecting ground water and an electric pump is pushing that water into an elevated tank.
Photo courtesy of Water For People In addition to Bolivia, Water For People works with local partners in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and India.

Millions of Americans use unsafe drinking water each year, a new study has found.
Water quality was poorest in parts of rural Texas, Oklahoma and Idaho during the time period studied.
In Martin County, Kentucky, residents never know what they’re going to get when they turn on their faucets.
Sometimes, they get milky water, or water that looks more like beer, according to a Los Angeles Times report.
(MORE: Major Cuts Coming to NWS?)
"We felt that in the aftermath of the Flint lead crisis, there was an urgent need to assess the current state of drinking water in the U.S.," University of California-Irvine urban planner Maura Allaire, who led the study, told USA Today.
The study, which examined 17,900 U.S. water systems from 1982 to 2015, found most of the nation’s drinking water is clean, but many of the areas that had poor water quality readings were repeated violators of federal health standards.
"Many of these smaller utilities have just a handful of people who are charged with managing the entire system," Manuel P. Teodoro, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, told the New York Times.
(MORE: The Secret About All That Snow at the PyeongChang Olympics) In Martin County, tainted water has become such a consistent, rampant problem that water bills often include warnings about the long-term health dangers from disinfectant byproducts used to remove toxins from the drinking water, the L.A. Times reported.
Some good news is on the horizon for residents of Martin County: Kentucky Gov.

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE — Wright-Patterson Air Force Base officials provided the Dayton city manager Feb. 27 with a list of actions taken by the Air Force to identify, respond to and prevent drinking water contamination linked to past firefighting activities on Wright-Patterson.
“As both the Ohio EPA and City of Dayton have stated, the drinking water is safe and we intend to continue working closely with all stakeholders to ensure it remains safe,” said Col. Bradley McDonald, 88th Air Base Wing and Installation commander.
“The Air Force is committed to protecting human health and the environment and we are working aggressively to ensure our installation and surrounding communities have access to safe drinking water.” “City leadership has requested the Air Force take urgent action and I can assure the Dayton community that we already have,” said McDonald.
PFOS and PFOA are components of many industrial and commercial products, including a legacy firefighting foam used by the Air Force and civilian airports to combat petroleum-based fires associated with aircraft fires.
Additionally, the base took an on-base well offline in April 2016 because it exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s then-provisional health advisory of 200 parts per trillion for PFOS.
In May 2016, the EPA established a lifetime health advisory of 70 parts per trillion of PFOS and PFOA in drinking water.
The base also installed monitoring wells on base property, quarterly sentinel monitoring wells across the installation, and plans to expand the site inspection to further identify threats to drinking water sources on and near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
The Air Force expects to begin work in June 2018 on an expanded site inspection which will include continued quarterly sentinel well monitoring at the base boundary.
If the site inspection determines PFOS/PFOA are migrating off the installation at levels above the EPA advisory, the Air Force will take additional actions.
To ensure a comprehensive investigation into potential threats to community drinking water, the Air Force encouraged the city to investigate whether civilian fire training centers and commercial operations are impacting drinking water well fields and treatment plants.

The Liberian government must prioritise clean water, decent sanitation and good hygiene for people across the country, if Goal 6 – the provision of clean water and decent sanitation for everyone everywhere – is to be reached by 2030, in Liberia.
Without water, decent sanitation and good hygiene, other Sustainable Development Goals, including those on gender equality, education, health, reducing inequalities and nutrition, cannot be achieved.
WaterAid warns without access to these basic amenities, men, women and children in Liberia will remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and disease, while being denied their basic human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation.
Across the world 844 million people still do not have access to clean water and 1 in 3 people still live without adequate sanitation facilities.
According to the 2017 Joint Monitoring Report on the “Progress on Drinking Water, Sanitationand Hygiene”, sanitation coverage is 9 percent among the richest quintile but just 1 percent among the poorest quintile.
WaterAid says urgent action to finance water and sanitation, to integrate it with efforts on health, nutrition and other related development, and to make progress sustainable is essential to reach everyone, everywhere.
For every US$1 spent on water and sanitation, on average $4 is returned in economic benefits.
Chuchu K. Selma, Deputy Country Director WaterAid Liberia and Sierra Leone, said: “We are at a critical juncture in the fight to get clean water, decent sanitation and good hygiene to the people of Liberia and across the world.
“We know that if everyone, everywhere was able to access clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene, then we could help end the scourge of extreme poverty and create a more sustainable future.
But we have to act now to make this a reality.

WASHINGTON, DC — The Water Well Trust, the only national nonprofit helping Americans get access to a clean, safe water supply, is seeking low income households from three counties in New York to receive new water wells or rehabilitate existing wells.
In October 2016, the USDA awarded a $52,081 grant to the Water Well Trust through its Household Water Well Systems Grant program for a project to increase potable water availability to rural households in three New York counties — Delaware, Rensselaer, and Columbia.
Funds are still available for low-interest loans to eligible individual households for a new water well or rehabilitation of an existing water well.
To be eligible to receive a WWT loan, applicants must be the owner and occupant of the home as their primary residence.
In addition, the applicant’s household income must not exceed 100 percent of the median non-metropolitan household income for the state in which the applicant resides.
The 2017 median non-metropolitan household income for New York is $62,500.
The income criteria apply to both the applicant and all other occupants of the home.
The Water Well Trust (WWT) is a 501(c)3 organization created by the Water Systems Council to provide a clean water supply to American families living without access to a precious resource most of us take for granted.
For more information, visit waterwelltrust.org.
Contact: Margaret Martens, Program Director Water Well Trust, mmartens@watersystemscouncil.org or 202-625-4383.

DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) – Following Wednesday’s Dayton City Commission meeting, the city manager praised Wright Patterson’s response to prevent drinking water contamination from previous firefighting activity on the base.
“We’re very pleased to see Colonel McDonald’s response with regards to they share our sense of urgency.
They do have some plans moving forward,” said City Manager Shelley Dickstein.
In part, Col. McDonald said, “The Air Force is committed to protecting human health and the environment and we are working aggressively to ensure our installation and surrounding communities have access to safe drinking water.” In 2015, inspectors found traces of toxic chemicals linked to foam previously used as a firefighting technique on the base.
As a precaution to prevent contamination into groundwater through the nearby Huffman Dam, the city shut down seven underground wells.
The base detailed its ongoing inspections and efforts to replace any remaining extinguishers and response vehicles using AFFF.
Col. McDonald also said the Air Force is planning a more thorough inspection this summer to determine whether more actions are necessary.
“We know well in advance if there’s some issue,” Dickstein said.
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