Each year world&-wide, more people die from drinking polluted water than from all forms of violence, which equates to an infant being killed by a lack of clean water every 20 seconds, a United Nations report released on March 22 stated.
Boston University’s ONE organization is working toward reducing that number by raising enough money to create a well in an impoverished region of Africa.
The well would provide clean water to 3,000 people a day, said College of Arts and Sciences junior Sarah Hunter, the vice president of ONE at BU.
ONE at BU has about 30 active members, Hunter said, and is part of the larger ONE organization.
Co-founded by Bono, the advocacy group boasts more than two million members and aims to eliminate poverty and preventable disease, according to the ONE.org website.
Every year, ONE issues a challenge to its campus chapters to launch an anti-poverty campaign in a variety of different areas ranging from holding book drives to help literacy in Libya and managing events for World AIDS Day.
Through these events each month, schools earn points based on performance, and whichever has the most points by the end of the year receives $10,000 to donate to the charity of their choice, according to the ONE.org website.
If ONE at BU wins the challenge, they hope to use the money to pay for a well in Africa, said Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences senior Nicole Santomauro, the group’s president.
Currently, ONE at BU is ranked seventh of the over 200 active participants in the ONE Campus Challenge. Knowing this, ONE at BU is launching a multi-platform awareness campaign in order to accrue as many points as possible.
The organization created a Facebook event urging people to change their statuses to a water-related issue from Tuesday through Friday. On the event page, ONE at BU gives examples of statuses students can post such as, “4,100 children will die today from water related issues, but what about tomorrow?” and “an American taking a five minute shower uses more water than the typical person living in a developing country slum uses in a whole day.”
Last week, the group screened the documentary “Blue Gold: World Water Wars,” and put up information displays in the George Sherman Union, Santomauro and Hunter said.
They also created a petition drive urging Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to support the Sen. Paul Simon Water for the World Act, which aims to provide over 100 million people with access to safe water.
“We’re trying to get a thousand people to sign up,” Hunter said.
The group has about 500 signatures and they will be continuing to collect them until Wednesday evening, Santomauro said.
“Since Sen. Kerry is the chairman of this committee, though not currently a co-sponsor of the bill, we have a great opportunity to really affect the vote by showing that this is an issue that we as voters feel is important,” she said.
ONE at BU plans on creating a three to five-minute video chronicling the project, which will be posted on the ONE website.
The amount of points ONE at BU receives will be partially dependent on the success of this video, Santomauro said.
“Our video will be available online early next week for voting and online votes will count for 40 percent of the judging,” Santomauro said.
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