Running for water ...
Filed in archive Sustainable Development by mstandaert on December 6, 2006
Part personal quest and part advocacy campaign, the journey-the subject of a feature documentary film, "Running the Sahara," directed by Oscar winner James Moll and narrated and executive-produced by Oscar winner Matt Damon-is taking Engle, Zahab and Lin across a continent, through villages, oases and nomad settlements, past mosques and mountains and over camel tracks, in one of the harshest climates on earth. For the runners, water is a daily necessity. For the people of the Sahara, and throughout the developing world, it is a lifelong concern.
This is made clear in the United Nations Development Programme's 2006 Human Development Report, Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis, which offers fresh new data on how many poor people go without water and sanitation, the inequality of access within and between nations, and on how clean water affects child survival rates.
Against the backdrop of the world-wide challenges the water crisis presents to development, the three men left St. Louis, Senegal, on an extreme trek through that country, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Libya and Egypt, and are set to finish the run in Cairo
sometime around the end of January. Along the way--while running the equivalent of two marathons a day for 75 to 90 days-they are interacting with the people who live in the 3.5 million square miles of the Sahara, and witnessing some of the work in human development being done by UNDP and others in the region. Among the UNDP and Global Environment Facility projects the runners are visiting are water-management, governance and peace-building efforts in Mali and Niger, a conservation project for medicinal plants in Egypt, dam construction in Mauritania and a school in Senegal. The trekkers entered Mali yesterday, and will reach the journey's approximate halfway point this week.There's a website where you can follow along their journey here, the last post being from the Mauritania/Mali border.
Spotted at Sociolingo's Africa Blog.
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