World War III is a distinct possibility unless we act now. The ignition switch of the conflict will most likely be water, not issues like the world oil supply or terrorism, as most people assume.

More than one Billion people live without adequate access to clean water. Over two and a half Billion people struggle to live without sanitation facilities in poor countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, and India.

Safe, clean water is a basic requirement of life. Most American citizens take the relative luxury of clean, running water for granted. Kaltuma Tahir, a forty-eight year old mother of six, is not so lucky. She lives in Kiberia, a festering slum where a million human beings live in rusty tin huts near the city of Nairobi, Kenya. Tahir's children regularly fall ill from drinking the contaminated water in Kiberia. There are no toilets, no access roads, no lighting and no drainage in the area. When the rainy season comes, flash floods cause raw sewage to float freely in the streets and backyards of the slum. The residents must pay exorbitant prices from their meager wages to unscrupulous vendors for a few liters of barely adequate water. Normally, twenty liters of water costs five cents. This price is much higher than the cost of piped water in the wealthy neighborhoods of Nairobi.

Research by the United Nations Population Fund indicates that one Billion people worldwide live in slums like Kiberia. This means one out of six people in the world live in desperate poverty without sanitation facilities. In Nairobi, the slums house sixty percent of the city's population. The UN predicts these statistics will double in the next twenty years.

Water shortages in poor countries like Kenya and Ethiopia breed more than disease. Competition for scarce water is a touchstone for violence between rival tribes and political interests. In Africa, lakes that once irrigated fields and provided safe water to entire villages are drying up. In the countryside, hundreds of thousands of farmers have become displaced nomads. The crops and cattle belonging to these African pastoral families perish rather than flourish in the arid conditions. Lake Haramaya, in eastern Ethiopia, provides a good example of this trend. The lake was once a broad body of water supporting 80,000 people. In the last eight years, Haramaya has shrunk to the size of a small puddle. Local residents have to dig twenty-five feet into the earth to strike water.

In tribal communities,

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