Water Access Improvements Will Improve Global Productivity

The Water For Women report released today written by a private-public partnership for the United Nations World Water Day highlights how very much global productivity can rise if the access of the poorer half the world’s population to water improves. Imagine the productivity of Christine Lagarde, Melinda Gates, Indra Nooyi and other great women if part of their daily work was walking 3.7 miles to get water for their families (the average in Asia and Africa), hand-washing their family’s clothes and dishes as part of their daily responsibility and being ill frequently because the water used for cleaning wasn’t always as clean as hoped. These are hours per day of productivity we take for granted in developed economies.