by Mark C. Hackett

Created on: March 25, 2010   Last Updated: March 26, 2010

Over one billion are without access to safe, clean drinking water. The obvious health consequences of this extremely high number was made even more apparent by a recent United Nations report, which stated that lack of clean water and basic sanitation claims more lives than violence every year. 

However, lack of sanitary water does far more damage against communities than merely affecting the overall health of the people living in them, it is also quickly becoming a major international security crisis.

Lack of access to clean water in war-ravaged regions of the world such as Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, puts additional strains on aid workers and UN peacekeeping troops, while simultaneously exacerbating already deeply complicated crises.

The acute poverty created from the lack of clean water that plagues these three countries, as well as many more, helps to keep the cycle of violence ongoing with seemingly no end.

Rebel movements in Sudan's Darfur region, northern Central African Republic, and eastern Congo many times are born from the most impoverished areas, and one of the seemingly universal claims among the multitude of these groups for taking up arms is a lack of government interest in providing the basic necessities for the people living in these areas.

In Darfur, the original rallying cry behind the rebel movements was that the entire region was being "marginalized" by the government in Khartoum. 

The international security concern at the bird's eye view though is rather easy to understand: people will fight to survive or make their survival easier, and this can have devastating consequences.

In Darfur, it led to a genocide, while in the Central African Republic it led to years of civil war, political mistrust, and what is on the verge of becoming the world's next failed state.

As one UNDP official once said, the Central African Republic is a country that is "sous serum," a metaphor to the country's current state of being heavily dependent on foreign aid similar to a hospital patient being hooked up to an IV.

Of course, lack of clean water was and is not the only factor in these conflict zones, but it is a major one that helps to keep the cycle of poverty and violence alive and well.

All of this, however, can be ended and prevented by providing clean drinking water and basic sanitation practices. 

At the community level, providing clean drinking water to defenseless people living in conflict zones

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