Healthy families mean healthy communities. Healthy communities access more education, can better support themselves and enjoy a higher standard of living. Easy access to safe water makes healthy families.  

Women and girls traditionally do most of the work collecting water and their time could be better spent on other things. Carrying heavy containers of water long distances every day causes girls to miss the opportunity to go to school and causes severe neck and back pain. The walk alone can also be dangerous.  

Women are the main carers, look after sick children, take them to clinics and buy medicine. Safe water reduces that burden on women, by reducing diarrhoeal diseases and infections. 

Menstruation 

Millions of girls around the world skip school or drop out all together when they have their periods.  

Education among both boys and girls, as well as easy access to safe water and washing facilities are key to helping girls feel comfortable in school, especially in areas where discussing or admitting the subject is taboo.  

Buying sanitary towels is seen as a luxury, among competing needs of a home, and poorer families will just do without. Girls will avoid school rather than risk an accident in public. Village Water partners address these issues, with both boys and girls, in menstrual health trainings where they will also learn how to make reusable sanitary pads.    

Talking about periods not only helps women and young people who menstruate learn about their own bodies, it is also the only way that harmful misconceptions in society are going to change.