Health and well-being
Safe drinking water, access to doctors, affordable medicine, clean toilets – it’s a no brainer yet still millions of people around the world do not have access to these basic needs.
In the next 24 hours diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation will claim the lives of 5,000 children. What is even more shocking is that most cases could be easily prevented.
It doesn’t stop there: illness prevents people from working, they don’t have enough money to pay for health fees and medicines - so not only are they trapped in the poverty cycle, it also damages the local economy.
Poor living conditions, being hungry and malnourished will weaken an immune system and make people more vulnerable to conditions such as diarrhoea and pneumonia. We stopped this happening in rich countries – and we can do it for poor countries too.
The Robin Hood Tax could raise billions very year to help provide essential healthcare, clean water and food in the world's poorest countries.
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Facts
- Today, 2.5 billion people, including almost one billion children, live without even basic sanitation.
- In the next 24 hours, diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation will claim the lives of 5,000 children.
- One in three people still do not have regular access to essential medicines.
- Each year 10 million children die unnecessarily from diseases that are easily preventable and cheap to treat, like diarrhoea, measles, and malaria.
- Every minute twenty children die from easily preventable diseases.
- Poor countries need six million more well-trained and well-paid teachers, doctors and nurses.
