One child dies every 20 seconds from diseases related to dirty water and inadequate sanitation conditions. Monday 22 March was World Water Day 2010, an event held every year to raise awareness of the fact that millions of people around the world still cannot take clean, safe water for granted.

Plan is a member of the End Water Poverty coalition, whose proposals to bring about a change in this situation will be discussed a month on from World Water Day, in the first ever international high level meeting on sanitation and water.

According to the United Nations, each person needs 20-50 litres of safe freshwater a day to ensure their basic needs for drinking, cooking and cleaning – but more than one in six people worldwide – 894 million, don’t have access to this amount of safe freshwater.

While most people are aware of the health problems associated with insufficient access to clean, fresh water, Plan is seeking to also highlight other more deeply-rooted social problems that lack of water provision causes.

Water collection is often seen as a task for only girls and women. This can mean that girls miss out on school in order to collect water for their families. Even if they are able to get to school, they still face the prospect of being sent away from their classroom by their teacher to go and collect water for the school.

Plan works with many communities, encouraging changes in behaviour where necessary and supporting efforts to improve access to clean, safe water.

At one village school in Mali for example, Plan responded when pupils raised the problem of drinking water supply. The pump at the N’gouraba primary school had been out of order for four years, and parents were having to bring water by donkey to supply the school. During extreme shortages children were often sent long distances to fetch water.

Rehabilitating the water supply involved cleaning the borehole, installing a manual pump, and constructing a washing area and a drainage system for waste water.

But Plan consider making communities self-sufficient as important as providing them with access to water. The school management committee was trained in management and maintenance of water points and Plan trained two manual pump repairmen.

Since the pump was repaired, cases of diarrhoea among the pupils have become much less frequent, and the access to clean, safe water has meant absences of girls from class have been reduced.

Plan is actively involved in water projects across the 49 countries where it works, collaborating with communities to identify sanitation problems, and jointly design solutions to enable community members to manage their own water and sanitation systems.

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