Over the course of the past two weeks, Global Citizen staff have been traversing across the Midwest and South hosting community discussions focusing on child health and vaccinations. While driving through Peoria, IL, the team on the road was lucky enough to get an invitation to stop by Caterpillar’s worldwide headquarters.
In addition to playing with some awesome (and enormous) machinery, the Global Citizen team also had the opportunity to present to hundreds of Caterpillar employees alongside Michele Sullivan, the President of the Caterpillar Foundation.
The presentation focused on the pressing need to create healthy and safe environments for children across the globe, which in many cases entails providing access to safe drinking water, useable toilets, and proper hand washing. For example, according to UNICEF, intestinal worms affect over 400 million school-aged children each year. This is a preventable disease with proper education and sanitary facilities.
Providing this education and these facilities is moral and economical. Studies show that for every $1 USD invested in water and sanitation, $4 are returned to the economy through productivity and decreased health costs.
US investment in this area can have a huge impact. Over the course of FY 2011 and 2012 the US Agency for International Development provided close to 7 million individuals with increased access to safe drinking water and close to 3 million with increased access to sanitation. There have been tremendous strides over the past couple of years, but there is a lot more work to do to ensure that all citizens of the world have access to these basic necessities.
Currently 800 million people do not have access to safe drinking water and 2.5 billion people do not have access to satisfactory sanitation facilities. The whole world including governments, companies like Caterpillar and global citizens like you, need to work together to provide these services so that children everywhere can live happy, healthy and productive lives.