It wasn’t just the imagination of our readers that was fired by our Christmas charity appeal last year for Pump Aid. It also caught the attention of the Live Earth Run for Water. In April millions of joggers and other runners in 40 countries will run or jog six kilometres in order to raise money and awareness of climate change. The event’s organisers announce today that all the money raised by British runners will go to The Times’s charity of Pump Aid. This has the merit that is is simple, direct and needs no admin, bureaucrats, aquacrats or kleptocrats.
Times readers, with their usual generosity, helped to raise more than £500,000 for Pump Aid to bring clean water to Africa. In this cold climate of floods and slush, where rain is a stock topic of both English humour and cricket, it is hard work to imagine the blessings of fresh water, that flows freely from the sky and out of the tap.
But the lack of clean water is the greatest curse of Africa. It causes more disease and kills more children and adults prematurely even than Aids. It was a parched Greek not a damp Brit in mackintosh and galoshes who opened his first Olympian ode: “Water is the best”.
The villagers dig their well and line it with local bricks and sand. The elephant rope pump raises water up a plastic pipe from 20 to 50 metres below ground, where the supply is permanent and the water is clean. It takes a day to install and costs £500. The pump becomes the possession of the village. And the watermakers are readers of this newspaper in a faraway country of which the villagers knew little. You givers can be congratulated for putting something back into the continent that has given us so much.