Water, folks. Water!

As the world leaders set out to determine how to achieve the new ambitious Sustainable Development Goals, we encourage them to explore ensuring access to affordable capital for sanitation solutions for all.

Why does hunger persist in a world of plenty? In a world that has made so much progress in achieving many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), cutting extreme poverty in half by 2010, why has it not yet cut hunger in half?

Achieving affordable access to safe water and sanitation for all has been one of humanity's most intractable problems. This is despite the fact that billions of us take these services for granted. We have known how to deliver affordable, safe water for more than 100 years yet for more than 2.5 billion people these services are absent.

In Haiti, 3.5 million people lack access to safe water. For most families, it is the responsibility of the women and children to find and collect it. Haiti is not unique in this tradition: Women and children from around the world collectively spend 140 million hours walking more than three miles to collect water each day.