BUILDING AND OVERSEEING 35,000 CLEAN WATER WELLS FOR THOSE IN NEED

There’s no arguing that clean, safe drinking water should be available to everybody…but the sad truth is that it simply isn’t.

Non-profits like Water Wells for Africa are working to change that, helping to uplift rural African communities by providing ‘sustainable water sources’ to those in need.

According to the WWFA, it costs around $8,000 per well – based on their work in Malawi and Mozambique – though it can vary depending on factors like materials, labour wages and location.

But this sum doesn’t just go to building the well… in fact, the WWFA says it’s also used to form an overseeing committee and to provide ‘hygiene and sanitation training’ to the village.

Based on the non-profit’s $8,000 estimate, the money our trio of anti-vaping groups have forked out could be used to build an astounding 35,000 wells.

It can be easy to forget how lucky we are to have food in our cupboards and fridges, especially when you consider that there are countless people going hungry around the globe.

The Share the Meal app – which is an initiative of the United Nation’s World Food Programme – is on a bold mission to address this international food crisis.

Through donations and volunteer work, it provides aid to places like Yemen, Syria and Nigeria and has already provided more than 170 million ‘shared meals’.

Amazingly, the scheme can feed one child for one day with just $0.80…imagine what it could do with $282 million.

Well, we ran the numbers and it turns out a sum like that could keep 965,753 hungry children fed for a year. That’s around 352,500,000 days’ worth of food.

Share the Meal does take a percentage of donations for fundraising, marketing, running costs and payment fees; but even when that’s accounted for, there are still 598,767 kids being fed for 12 months.

When those of us the UK suffer a bump, scratch, broken bone or any other number of issues, we can usually find help through the NHS.

And while there may be issues with our health service – and this isn’t certainly the platform to discuss those – there are some places in the world that just don’t have access to medical care.

This mean millions of children can unnecessarily die from preventable diseases like malaria, cholera and typhoid every year…a crisis UNICEF is trying to combat.

According to the charity, a £55 donation can be used to train a health worker so they can ‘provide children and their mothers with life-saving care’; this includes nutritional advice, supplements and mosquito nets.

If the $282 million forked out by our trio of antivaping big spenders were repurposed for this, there could be an additional 5.1 million health workers with the skills to help those in need.

35,250,000

Harmful Alternative

Despite the growing vape industry and efforts from public health and harm reduction campaigners, there is still an estimated 1.1 billion smokers in the world.

That means an eighth of our global population is still – in some way – being subjected to the deadly health effects of cigarettes…before you even account for all those suffering through second-hand harms.

But what if the $282 million figure was used to introduce these smokers to vaping, what kind of difference might it make?

The average disposable can cost anywhere from $5 to 10; if we split the difference and say $8, that sum could be used to buy 35,250,000 smokers their first vape.

And while not all of them would necessarily take to it, if just ten percent decided to make the switch then there would still be more than 3.5 million people who move away from cigarettes.

To read our full-story on the AVM’s report, check out our story ‘Follow the money’ in issue 41 of the magazine.