A nine-year-old boy drinks water running from an outdoor tap at a water point in Sao Tome.
Photo: UNICEF/ HQ97-1189/Giacomo Pirozzi
For some children, this means getting up at 4 in the morning and walking at least 6 hours. Once there, the water collected is untreated, and the bacteria that live in the water can lead to a whole host of fatal diseases like hepatitis A, cholera and typhoid. A devastating 4,000 children die each day as a result of diseases caused by ingestion of unsafe water.
UNICEF is dedicated to providing safe drinking water to all those families who struggle daily. But despite our efforts, there are still over 1 billion people don't have access to purified water and one in three lacks a basic toilet! Children pay the highest price for an unhygienic world and ordinary diarrhoea, caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation, kills over 5000 children every day (the second highest single cause of child deaths).
Sanitation and Water for All
After lots of campaigning, in April 2010 UNICEF hosted the first ever high-level meeting of the global partnership ‘Sanitation and Water for All’, which aims to address the barriers preventing the water and sanitation Millennium Development Goal (MDG) being achieved in the countries that are most off-track. Find out more about the high-level meeting.
See how many points you can earn in the battle against bacteria in our Facebook Make a Stink! game.
Make a Stink!
See how many points you can earn in the battle against bacteria - play the Make a Stink! game on Facebook. Send it to your friends and see if you can beat their scores while raising awareness of water and sanitation issues around the world.
Have you got what it takes to stop these toilet terrors?
Real lives
UNICEF works with children all over the world to help them lead a better life. Read some of our success stories and learn how difficult some children find gaining access to safe drinking water:
Fatima's Story from Angola
Ibrahim's Story from Iraq