LS&Co. Unzipped

Mar 22 2011

Safe Water for All

Today is World Water Day. You may give it only a passing thought. Not Kebedech Hagos, though. For her, it’s a reminder of how far she’s come.

Until the Water.org water project, which resulted in a well in her Ethiopian village, Kebedech would walk miles to a river to fetch and carry—on her back—the five gallons of contaminated water that would barely sustain her family’s needs for the day.

We’re proud to be part of a community working to help people like Kebedech.  But too often, our community talks in narrow terms. We truck in clean water after an earthquake or work with a village to drill wells. These are profound and life-saving interventions, but even after tremendous effort and progress over the past several decades, we’re still missing nearly 40 percent of the world’s population.

And while Kebedech now has access to safe water, nearly 900 million other people around the world continue to go without.

For more than a century, we’ve known how to make water safe and eradicate water-related diseases like cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. Yet they continue to claim one child’s life every 20 seconds.  Imagine if we discovered the cure for AIDS today and 100 years later children were still dying because we couldn’t develop an effective system for delivering it.

On this World Water day, we call for greater introspection and courage on the part of all those tackling this crisis.  We must diversify our approach to include bold, entrepreneurial solutions that drive large-scale change.

Levi Strauss & Co. is a serious advocate for the preservation of water resources. They’ve provided leadership within the business community through programs that monitor and significantly reduce their water footprint. And they’ve now unleashed the spirit of ingenuity on their denim. With the launch of Water<Less™ jeans, the Levi’s® brand is poised to save 16 million litres of water in the spring of 2011. 

And today, on World Water Day, the brand will seize the moment to launch the Levi’s® Water Tank, educating people about how they can participate in water savings. Because at the end of the day, consumers use more water caring for their jeans then the brands themselves use in the production process. As customer participation increases, so does Levi’s support to Water.org by “unlocking” water from the Levi’s® Water Tank. In return, Levi’s will make a contribution to Water.org’s sustainable water programs that will provide more than 200 million liters of clean drinking water.

I hope that others will look to this as an example of how to develop deeply engaging, bold initiatives that tackle the global water challenge on all fronts—raise awareness, inspire action, deliver direct impact, and build upon real innovation.

While Ethiopia’s Kebedech Hagos now has access to safe water, there are hundreds of millions of people who still do not. This World Water Day, let’s all work together to summon the spirit of innovation and explore the new approaches needed to make global access to safe water and sanitation a reality in our lifetime.

Posted By: Gary White, Executive Director and Co-Founder, Water.org
	Tags: Levi Strauss & Co.,Levi's®,Social Responsibility

Before posting your comment, please read the Blog Guidelines.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Comment

By submitting this form, you accept the Mollom privacy policy.

Before posting your comment, please read the Blog Guidelines.