Children's Safe Drinking Water

Within the scope of the Children's Safe Drinking Water programme, Procter & Gamble is providing PUR water purifying sachets at a not-for-profit cost to PSI who will then use a four-tier strategy to market PUR in the Dominican Republic. PUR is a powder that, when mixed with water, removes pathogens and extracts all solid matter. PUR uses the same ingredients as municipal water treatment facilities, but is packaged in a sachet allowing the user to treat water in the home. According to PSI, PUR point-of-use water treatment programmes have achieved significant reductions in diarrhoeal disease, with especially high reductions in areas where people take their water from surface or turbid sources.

PSI will market the PUR sachets through the following activities.

• Conduct traditional social marketing with a multi-media brand awareness campaign and a network of community groups and educators, such as United States Peace Corps volunteers, to provide training on safe drinking water.
• Distribute PUR through P&G's distributor, Corripio, who will ensure the product is widely available and provide free air-time on their four affiliated television stations.
• Distribute PUR through P&G's pharmacy distributor, Daniel Espinal, who will pilot a social programme with their own employees and with their mid- and high-end stores by providing a collection container for donation of PUR sachets to the most disadvantaged.
• Provide PUR to emergency relief agencies for the victims of the frequent floods and hurricanes that hit the region.

The social marketing campaign is implemented alongside complementary communications campaigns on the causes and dangers of diarrhoea, the importance of treating water and general hygiene practices.

According to PSI, the combination of home water treatment, hand-washing and proper hygiene provides a substantial reduction in the number of diarrhoea episodes, thereby improving children’s health, nutrition, growth and development, and dramatically reducing the fatality rate. Affordable safe water especially benefits families with limited access to quality health care services for the treatment of diarrhoea and those who can least afford the productivity lost on caring for children suffering from bouts of diarrhoea.

According to PSI, diarrhoea kills 2.2 million people around the world annually, mostly economically poor children, and is largely attributable to contaminated water. It is an underlying cause of childhood malnutrition and is the world’s second leading killer of children under five - every day 5,000 children die from it.