Invest Sensibly and Retire Happily

According to the statistics provided by the World Health Organisation, approximately 40% of the world’s population live without access to adequate sanitation and clean water.

Poor sanitation is the cause of chronic diarrhoea, cholera, intestinal worms and blindness from trachoma. Each year approximately 2.2 million people die of diarrhoea. This is the equivalent of 20 plane crashes each day or 1 death every 15 seconds. The vast majority of those affected are under the age of 5 years old.

If 5,000 children in the so-called “developed world” were to die each day due to a single cause, I am sure that the situation which was causing these deaths would be rectified without delay.

So why should it be different for children who happen to live in the so-called “developing world”?

Despite such a large proportion of the world’s population living in abject conditions, so many of us are more concerned about spending our disposable incomes on seemingly pointless material goods and on the latest gadgets which are often just a newer version of something that we already have, albeit with some minor modifications.

By using a relatively small amount of your disposable income you could provide an entire village with a clean water supply system and at the same time eradicate a significant number of premature deaths from the diseases brought about by an unclean water supply and poor sanitation.

When you’re retired and you look back on your life at what you’ve achieved, which would make you feel most satisfied? The fact that you have spent large sums of your hard earned money on material goods which you no longer use? Or the fact that your hard earned money has vastly improved the living conditions for an entire village for generations to come?

Over the last 70 years, a charity called Plan International which currently has development programs in 46 different countries, has improved the living conditions and education of millions of people across the world.

Plan International’s position on resolving water and sanitation problems is made clear on their website.

“Plan makes work on water, sanitation and hygiene a priority in all of the countries where it has development programs. Plan believes that local people should be actively involved in the process of identifying water and sanitation problems, designing solutions and managing systems in their own communities.”

For more information on how you can contribute to a number of truly worthy causes, visit plan-international.org.

Note: The writer has no connection with Plan International. This article was written to promote the good work that Plan International do, in the hope that it would encourage readers of this article to contribute to their many worthy causes.