17 Mar 2009, Silver Spring, Maryland, United States….ANN Staff
Adventists aid organizations are observing the United Nation's World Water Day on March 22 by continuing to build safe, accessible wells and improving sanitation for hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
World Water Day, established in 1993 after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), is an international day to raise awareness about the 1 billion people without access to clean water.
In Mozambique, both the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) and Maranatha Volunteers International are working to provide safe, easily accessible water in the country where 70 percent of the population live without it, leaders for the organizations said.
ADRA, the international aid organization of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, is partnering with relief organization Samaritan's Purse in a multi-million dollar project that will include supplying drinkable water to thousands of Mozambicans. The organizations are providing water filtration systems and repairing hand-pumps and hand-dug wells.
Maranatha Volunteers International, a supporting ministry of the Adventist Church, has completed 100 deep-water wells in Mozambique and plans to drill roughly 700 more in the future. Over 400,000 people will have access to water after the wells are completed.
Another ADRA project is providing safe water for 14,000 inhabitants of the Little Andaman, Andaman and Nicobar islands, all territories of India. The project, which began in 2007, is rehabilitating wells and improving water sanitation in the islands devastated during the December 2004 tsunami.
For more information about water projects, visit adra.org and maranatha.org.
