Friday, March 16, 2012

AFRICA - Man-Made Water Shortages

"What's Causing Water Shortages in Ghana, Nigeria?" PBS Newshour 3/15/2012

Excerpt

STEVE SAPIENZA, special correspondent: Every day, millions of people across a wide swathe of West Africa struggle to get access to clean and safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 1,000 people in the region die each day from illnesses related to unsafe water.

The shortage is also hampering development here. In two of the biggest and richest nations of the region, Nigeria and Ghana, pollution, political unrest, and corruption have contributed to water shortages for decades.

What's different today is that a new generation of West African journalists is trying to hold government officials accountable for the failures. We followed two of them, Nigeria's Ameto Akpe and Ghana's Samuel Agyemang, as they did their jobs.

As a reporter for Nigeria's BusinessDay newspaper, Ameto's stories target the contradiction of a country with immense oil wealth and great water resources that are not reaching their citizens.

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