Summer Lopez is from the United States. She is currently working in development in Ghana. Recently she offered some insight about the clean water crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa and other current events.

Most of the work I do is actually in girls' education, but I can certainly tell you why wells and clean water make such a big difference to education.

In villages without easy access to clean water, children are usually the ones who walk miles to fetch water in the mornings.  As a result, they are perpetually late to school, and exhausted when they arrive, making it very difficult for them to ever take full advantage of their schooling.  There are a lot of things that need to be improved about the education system here in Ghana (and no doubt most places in Africa), but none of those improvements will matter if the children can't make it to class in the morning. That is not even considering the effect that less than clean water can have on child mortality and school attendance and retention rates.  I have seen first hand that villages who obtained a borehole, or well, see a direct increase in school attendance and student performance. I have also been told by members of such a village that, quite simply, with a well, the children don't get sick anymore.  It seems so simple to us, but what I see in many of the development projects I've observed here is that not much will ever get done if people don't have clean water first.

I used to live in Egypt, where I felt like a constant representative of US policy, even when I completely disagreed with it.  Here I find very little focus on major international news.  The day war broke out in Iraq it did not make the front page of the local newspapers here in Accra--they were, as ever, devoted to a quote from a local politician. I think in some ways that says good things about Ghana, that the country has enough of a political life of its own that people don't have to focus on events half a world away.

I suspect that among people here who work in development there is indeed frustration, especially as money from USAID gets cut or even when funding within major international agencies like CARE has to be diverted to the Middle East to help the war relief, but I don't think the average rural Ghanaian has much sense of that.  No Ghanaian has mentioned the war to me or asked me my opinion on Bush or anything like that, and I imagine the more rural you get the less people are interested...the memory of Clinton's visit a few years ago, where he was almost crushed by a mob because they adored him so much is likely to stick in people's mind more than current news, to which most people have little access.

There are millions of needy people we can help or liberate in Africa without any "collateral damage" or great risk to international stability.  And unlike the "war on terrorism," this is a fight that can be clearly won.  We have the funds, we just have to be willing to dedicate them to something less dramatic than war.