First of all: why water?

Drinking water is still inaccessible for longer 700 million of people. Most of them live in rural and isolated areas, and they use many hours of the day to recover this resource. The lack of drinking water is a problem from a hygienic point of view, and also takes a lot of time, especially from women and children, who take care of its collection. The lack of adequate education is the first obstacle to poverty reduction: investing in drinking water has a very high economic and social return in the developing community.

The water equality project

The project brings drinking water to those who do not have access to it to an extent equivalent to what we use every day. In Italy, a person directly consumes about 250 liters per day; this is the direct water footprint.

With WAMI we therefore decided to balance it by bringing, for each participant in TEDxMilano, the same number of liters to a family in the village of Rockwood, located in one of the poorest areas of Sri Lanka, where around 86% of households do not have access to safe drinking water.

The impact of water equality

This project contributes to the achievement of some fundamental SDGs of the United Nations 2030 Agenda: making drinking water accessible to all leads to better hygiene conditions, and is a step towards improving the gender equality and quality education, allowing girls to go to school and women to train professionally. Finally, it is crucial to the fight against climate change, because direct access to water reduces CO2 emissions.