Today, we celebrate World Water Day. Since 1993, this United Nations Observance Day is held on March 22nd every year to focus on the importance of freshwater and raise awareness of the 2 billion people currently living without access to safe water. A core focus of World Water Day is also to inspire action towards Sustainable Development Goal 6: water and sanitation for all by 2030.
This year, the focus is groundwater, an invisible resource with an impact visible everywhere. This year’s campaign with the title “Groundwater – Making the invisible visible” puts the focus on groundwater’s vital role in water and sanitation systems, agriculture, industry, ecosystems and climate change adaptation and calls for exploring, protecting and sustainably using groundwater in order to meet the needs of a growing population.
As groundwater supplies a large proportion of the water we use for drinking, sanitation, food production and industrial processes, HOPE’87 attaches great importance to the provision of freshwater throughout its projects. In our projects in the border area of Burkina Faso and Mali, HOPE’87 together with the expertise of UNITED TEAMS – the strategic alliance of the YOU Foundation – has set up boreholes with water towers in order to supply water for agricultural purposes.
Take a look at our pictures from Burkina Faso and Mali, where with the supply of freshwater we managed to create resilience against the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as food and nutritional security for small scale producers through capacity building in the area of gardening and agricultural production.