What We Do

It is a disturbing fact that millions of men, women, and children in today’s modern society, are forced to fight for their very lives just to exist.

Without access to safe drinking water and surviving with almost no food, psychological trauma and socio-economic delinquencies/deficiencies amongst others which they represent the most vulnerable section of the world’s population. These long-suffering, impoverished communities are locked in a deadly cycle of drought, famine, sickness and death. This terrible cycle is initiated and exacerbated by the fact that many of these communities have no access to clean and safe drinking water. In the areas where NOW Foundation currently provides life-saving aid, approximately 544 million people are living without access to clean drinking water and without enough food to eat.

Recent years alone over 840,000 people died because of water-related disease alone! That heart-breaking and desolate total of lost human life could have been massively reduced by a fast and determined intervention. We at NOW Foundation NEVER want to see such a horrific number of lives lost again especially in circumstances that could have been avoided. Part of our core mission is to do everything in our power, to stop such a tragedy ever happening again. We want to act NOW to offer our life-saving, humanitarian interventions. Together, we can help reduce this horrific annual cost in human life. We can only do this NOW – with your help!

Study reveals a shocking fact that each year approximately 840,000 people die from disease contracted from drinking unsafe water is unfathomable. These most vulnerable people in our global population are also doomed to watch their children wither and die before their very eyes unless this deadly cycle of sickness and death is broken.

The frail and painfully vulnerable children in these stricken communities pay a huge cost with their lives, each year that passes. They are most at risk because their bodies aren’t strong enough to fight water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea and dysentery and the downhill spiral from there is a rapid and tragic one, repeated across these overwhelmed regions every single minute, hour after hour, day after day.

In developing countries, people spend around 40 billion hours every year searching for water to drink! Those who bear the greatest burden of collecting water are usually women and children. The water they collect is often contaminated and even though they know it might kill them, they are left with no choice but to quench   thirst for drink.   

In addition to the exhausting journeys and treacherous conditions for this contaminated water, when you factor in the sickness and starvation, you can begin to understand the challenges these people face every day, just to survive and battle again tomorrow. Many children are often forced into this back-breaking but imperative chore, which means they get even more exhausted, thus increasing their risk of disease. This means that these trapped and exhausted children not only miss school but are left vulnerable to abuse and sexual assault when they are travelling unsupervised.

Widows rather than being sympathized with, are more often subjected to near inhuman treatment and mundane practices in traditional ritual rites such as solitary confinement, defacement, disinheritance, forced marriage to late husband’s relatives, drinking of water from the corpse to prove her innocence and a relatively long mourning period of limited socioeconomic activities. These activities sometimes affect the children of the widows.

These practices often result in deepening poverty, acute stress, depression, loss of identity and self-esteem. The widowhood conditions expose women to psychological and physical abuse as well as a whole range of health-related problems. According to research, women who were recently widowed have substantially higher rates of depressed mood, poorer social functioning, lower mental health and physical functioning than the women who were widowed over a year.

• The foundation’s roles are ensuring and determined to help every one of these drought-stricken communities, to establish their own clean water sources.
• Now Foundation focuses on improving the quality of life of vulnerable population across communities in Nigeria.
• It operates both emergency and developmental context and have in its program principally rooted in identifying gaps that affects population and bridging those gaps through resource-based planning and implementation.