African Women and Water Update

Women's Earth Alliance

Following our 2008 African Women and Water Conference in Nairobi, co-organized by A Single Drop, Crabgrass, Groots Kenya, and Women's Earth Alliance and hosted by the Greenbelt Movement, our women participants returned to their communities invigorated--each team has received seed grant to implement innovative water projects. Women across Africa are building solar cookers, erecting water storage tanks, constructing water filters, and training others to do the same. We are receiving exciting reports from A Single Drop and GROOTS Kenya advisors, who are coordinating site visits to the women's projects and supporting them in their steps toward creating income-generating water projects.

We invite you to watch a short video from our African Women and Water Conference, which features our special guest, Dr. Wangari Maathai. For an inside look at partner's successes, visit the blog at www.africanwomenandwater.org. Stay tuned for updates on our West Africa program, being launched in Ghana in early 2010.

Military sonar blamed for mass dolphin strandings

Mass strandings of dolphins and whales could be caused because the animals are rendered temporarily deaf by military sonar, experiments have shown.

Tests on a captive dolphin have demonstrated that hearing can be lost for up to 40 minutes on exposure to sonar. Hearing is the most important sense for dolphins and other cetaeceans, and losing it is likely to cause them to become disorientated and alarmed...

Pepsi Adopts Human-Right-to-Water Policy

"This agreement moves beyond the vague promises of water conservation that many corporations claim to support," said Julie Goodridge, CEO of NorthStar Asset Management, a socially responsible company that helped Pepsi develop its new resolution on water. "It fully commits the company to respecting the right to sufficient clean water, as well as individuals' rights to be involved in the development of processes that extract water from their communities."..."

The UN estimates that currently a billion people in the developing world, mainly poor and marginalized communities, lack access to water and that figure is projected to grow to two out of three people in the near future," writes Mark Hays of Corporate Accountability International....