One in six people in the world lacks proper access to safe drinking water. On 10 November, the United Nations Development Programme and Publicis Italy are launching a campaign to make a lot more people in the world aware of that.

Many of the 1.1 billion people deprived of sufficient safe drinking water must make do with as little as five litres a day for all their drinking, washing and cooking needs---one-tenth of the average quantity that rich countries’ inhabitants flush daily down their toilets. Some 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation. In 2004, diarrhoea alone killed six times the number of people who died annually in armed conflict in the 1990s. And according to the Report, the US$10 billion investment required to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015 would generate US$38 billion a year in economic benefits.

Click here to view the UNDP's Water Alert Campaign