A candid look inside Dhaka’s water sanitation problems

In case you haven’t done anything special for World Water Week yet, now’s your chance. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting just came out with an awesome multimedia project on water issues in Bangladesh.

The project, titled “Dhaka’s Challenge: A Megacity Struggles with Water, Sanitation and Hygiene,” focuses on the severe water problems in Dhaka’s most impoverished slums.

Almost 4 million people in Dhaka are living without basic services like safe water and toilets, and about two-thirds of the sewage is left untreated and left to seep into the waterways into the ground. As a result, almost 50,000 Bangladeshi children die each year from related waterborne diseases such as cholera, diarrhea and typhoid.

Access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation facilities could transform the lives of millions in the world’s poorest countries. Universal access to water and sanitation could prevent thousands of child deaths and free up hours each day for women and children to go to work or school.

Watch the video above and be sure to take a look at some of the other stories in the series. I think you’ll be surprised by the refreshingly candid reporting from award-winning documentary producer Stephen Sapienza and Pulitzer Center Executive Director Jon Sawyer.