Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village!
The solution is to tell them why clean water matters, and provide them a cheap way of making dirty water pretty clean. Ie. a water filter.
The cheapest water filters, costing perhaps $10 and able to filter a family drinking water supply for years, will still eliminate most concerning contamination in water.
The best water filters - pumped reverse osmosis systems - are still only a few hundred dollars, and will also give a family drinking water for many years.
In thailand for example, vending machines exist which cost a few cents to use and will dispense a few liters of filtered water. These help spread the cost of the expensive filter between people and across time.
This a truly big problem that has been going surfaced for decades, and I honestly have become split...
On one side, France in particular, but many other "developed" nations as well have stepped in to build the infrastructure and provide clean water to places where it was problematic.
Only to monopolize water distribution one way or the other, resulting in people not able to afford the water at the end, while losing their previous precarious access to dirty but natural sources as well.
Nestle, Danone are the poster child of these predatory moves.
On the other side, there few places poorer countries can turn to. Japan might be one, but they suck at diplomacy. Then there is China, and they need to be willing to dance.
And places lacking water tend to lack education and political freedom as well.
I'd want to hold higher hopes, but it only ever progresses so slowly, as the incentives are basically stacked against real progress.
Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?
I didn’t find this in the article, and am still confused. Do they boil their water? Doesn’t it help with disease? There was one example of the family spending time collecting firewood equal to time collecting water, but boiling was still missing. Also, what about filtering? You can do it with charcoal.
I was raised to both filter and boil tap water before drinking. I don’t understand why these aspects are not mentioned when discussing safe drinking water.
Dollar street [1] (linked from the article) by Gapminder is a fascinating resource for learning about what life is really like for many people.
I'm disappointed that the article conflates together "safe" and "convenient". Out of the 2B who "don't have safe drinking water", About 1.75B have an "improved source", which is a source that "is not free from contamination, [or] is not on the premises, or [is not] always available."
Of course we should work toward a world where everyone has clean, highly available water inside the home, but by conflating "unsafe" with "outside the home", the article gives the impression of trying to gin up support by exaggerating the safety problem. On some level, I get it. "2B People Don't Have Safe Running Water Inside Their Homes," is considerably less punchy, even if more accurate.
What are the country/world leaders doing to solve this?
How many of them have mobile or internet connection?
2 billion people is coincidentally the population growth since 2000. So overall I suspect this means that tremendous progress has been made on safe drinking water.
Makes you wonder where the likely hundreds of billions for third world countries went to ?
What happened to dysfunctional nations in the past was they got absorbed into empires or otherwise subjugated. This put a floor on internal dysfunction.
Today, there's some combination of factors that prevents this from happening to the same extent. A net good, but there's a downside.
And how many of these 2B people life in China or India? Such countries that have actively decided to persue manned spaceflight and innumerable other prestige programs ahead of safe drinking water. Rather than doing thier job for them, we should be lobbying for these countries to put thier own people first.
Just invest more in AI and datacenters. Problem solved.
We also need to think about uses of water.
Water is used for drinking (~2 liters/day)... Contamination here really matters.
Waker is used for cooking (~20 liters per day). Contamination here matters somewhat, since some forms of pollutants will be rendered harmless by cooking.
Water is used for washing (~200 liters per day). Contamination here matters a little too, because washing water can touch something which gets eaten etc.
Water is used for farming (~2000 liters per day/person fed). Contamination here barely matters - but some things can still make it into foodstuffs.
Providing small quantities of clean water is far cheaper than providing large amounts.