Hunger

Relieving hunger in Africa has to begin with access to clean water. It may seem simple, but we forget that without access to a reliable source of water, food is hard to grow and even more difficult to preserve and prepare.

It takes huge amounts of water to grow food. Just think, globally we use 70% of our water sources for agriculture and irrigation, and only 10% on domestic uses.

Water is fundamental to relieving hunger in the developing world. 84% of people who don’t have access to improved water, also live in rural areas, where they live principally through subsistence agriculture. Sometimes, areas that experience a lack of water suffer because of poor water management, but more often it is a relatively simple economic issue that can be addressed. This is the difference between physical and economic scarcity.

The Rural-Urban divide

In Sub-Saharan Africa, people in urban areas areas are twice as likely as people in rural areas to have clean, safe water. Another way that we see the urban-rural divide is in sanitation. While rural areas often have less access to sanitation facilities, in Sub-Saharan Africa the situation is very poor. Only 24% of the rural population, and 44% of the urban population have access to sanitation facilities. This means that less than one in three people in Sub-Saharan Africa have access to a proper toilet.