The sheer number of people without access to clean and safe drinking water is staggering. According to the World Health Organization, in 2015 2.1 billion people didn’t have access to safely managed drinking-water services. Of those people ‘423 million people were taking water from unprotected wells and springs; and 159 million people were collecting untreated surface water from lakes, ponds, rivers and streams.’ It’s this desperate need, the need of millions to have cleaner and safer water to drink that drives us on and that has us support the Africa Trust. With a percentage of every water dispenser sale donated to the trust, AquAid has to date donated over £6 million pounds, built over 8,000 water wells in different developing countries on the continent, and helped bring safe drinking water to more than 1.2 million people.

There are many other organizations that also keep this dire need top of mind, and one such initiative is WATERisLIFE who have developed the new clean sip straw filters – a portable water purifier that can be used in any water source to provide water that is safe to drink.

This is how it works:

‘Inside the WATERisLIFE straw are membranes, patented filter material, and active carbon, which removes the taste and medium size bacteria. The technology protects against waterborne bacteria and viruses like typhoid, cholera, E. coli, dysentery and diarrhea. The smaller filters use new groundbreaking technology to cover a broader range of contaminates. Additionally, these filters deal with heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and aluminum, arsenic, fluoride, chlorine, cadmium, giardia, E Coli, algae, hydrogen sulfide, cholera, and typhoid.’

And this is how it makes a difference:

‘Each WATERisLIFE straw filter will provide hundreds of liters of clean water (typical use is 2-3 liters of water per day per person). Once it is no longer effective, the straw will stop being able to draw water. $10 puts a filter into the hands of a person who desperately needs it. ‘

If you also want to know that you’re making a difference and helping to bring clean and safe drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people, then choose an AquAid watercooler or water dispenser, because with every cup of AquAid water you help bring water to Africa.