Nearly one in five child deaths – about 1,5 million each year – are due to diarrhoea, cholera and other water-borne diseases. As climate change and intensifying drought conditions affect larger and larger areas, access to clean drinking water becomes an increasingly desperate need, especially for nomadic tribes whose only source of water is often a muddy, dung-infested waterhole.
The Kingsley Holgate Foundation’s water purification campaign, which supports communities in deeply rural areas that have unsafe, contaminated drinking water, continues to save and improve lives.
Provided by Vestergaard, LifeStraw® water filters remove 99.9% of waterborne parasites and prevent people from succumbing to diseases such as dysentery and cholera. The individual LifeStraw® units filter 1,000 litres of contaminated water providing enough safe drinking water for one person for one year, and the family-sized units each filter up to 35,000 litres of water.
To date, the Kingsley Holgate Foundation has distributed over 36,000 individual LifeStraw units and family-size units.
Our efforts to provide clean drinking water to people in Africa goes further. In 2019 when Cyclone Idai devastated central Mozambique, in an emergency, race-against-time journey, we delivered clean drinking water and 50,000 water purification sachets to provide one million litres of potable water to 30,000 victims of Cyclone Idai living in devastated rural villages on the boundaries of Gorongosa National Park, so helping to alleviate the spread of cholera and other water-borne diseases.
In addition, through our Early Childhood Development humanitarian work, we also provide water tanks to impoverished rural creches as well as water piping and community-sized reservoirs for water-scarce communities in northern KwaZulu-Natal. These now provide clean drinking water to 5,000 children and community residents every day.
In total, and thanks to the wonderful support of suppliers, volunteers and our partners, the Kingsley Holgate Foundation has to date provided over 63 million litres of clean drinking water to needy communities across Africa.
