P&G Children’s Safe Drinking Water

Living in North America, clean drinking water isn’t something we often have to worry about. And living in Houston, Texas my family does a lot of activities surrounding water. Especially in the summer with Knox, we water our plants and can drink straight out of the faucet. We are very lucky to have the chance to live this way so when I was approached by P&G to partner with them for their non-profit, ‘Children’s Safe Drinking Water (CSDW)’Program, it touched my heart, and I wanted to do anything I could to help spread the word.

Before we get into what P&G’s Purifier of Water packets can do for children and families around the globe, consider these alarming statistics:

- According to World Health Organization (2014), 663 million people lack access to an improved water source
- Each day, nearly 1,000 children die due to diseases caused by drinking contaminated drinking water, according to WHO
- Women and children spend 40 billion hours each year collecting water and managing household water needs rather than attending school or earning income for their families

P&G leveraged its history and innovation in cleaning to develop a way to better the lives of those in need. If they could make dirty laundry clean, why not transform drinking water in under developed countries? So, in 2004, P&G launched the CSDW Program, which has now provided clean water to families in over 75 countries. Over the past ten years, CSDW has provided more than 10 billion (that’s billion with a B!) liters of clean drinking water, helping to save thousands of lives and empower women and girls around the world!

P&G is committed to delivering 15 billion liters of clean water by 2020, but we need your help.

To celebrate the occasion of providing the 10 billionth liter of clean drinking water, P&G will be offering a 10 to 1 donation match – for every US $1 donated to the program by consumers until the end of the month, P&G will give $10 up to a P&G contribution of $1 million.

How does that translate to water for the families in need? A $7.50 donation will provide safe drinking water for one child for one year and a $30 donation will provide safe drinking water to an entire family for one year. So by forgoing your morning latte for a day or two (depending on where you get it) you can change a child’s life, and allow them to spend more time receiving an education that will provide them with an opportunity for a healthy and prosperous future.

If you are curious how the packets work, Knox and I did a fun experiment to see it in action first hand.

I wanted to take this opportunity to try to explain to Knox that not all children are as fortunate as we are and some families don’t even have clean water to drink. I demonstrated by pouring a shovel of dirt into this clean bucket of water. Then, I proceeded to tell him that we could help these families by sending them little packets of ‘magic powder’ that can turn their dirty water into clean water like our faucets have.