Time now to answer to our Geo Quiz...We were tracing the equator to East Africa. It crosses right through a country that's about twice the size of Nevada.

The answer is Kenya.

Kenyan Flag
Kenya is among the many nations of the world where there's a serious shortage of clean drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates more that billion people on the planet lack access to safe water. Experts at the World Water Forum in Mexico City are discussing global water issues today. Among the delegates in Mexico City is Josephine Mwatibo. She's just 18 years old, but she's already familiar with the reality of water scarcity in her country, Kenya:

"In my house, I have access to water but not at the moment, because they have to do water rationing and sometimes the water is never there and it's there for only half a day, and in half a day it's maybe distributed to other people who don't have water."

Sanitation is another problem that goes hand in hand with water scarcity. Mwatibo says at her local school, it's a serious concern: "In my school - they only have maybe, let's say, ten toilets for a thousand students, and sometimes you have to go there, you have to wait, because it's break time and everyone is running to the toilets. And the break time is very short, but not everyone gets the time to enter, so some people go into the bushes and, you know, the playing fields where people play, and actually help themselves there - which is posing a health risk to the other people."

Mwatibo is surprised to hear that people in the west can just turn on the tap, and clean water will flow.

"Is the water from your taps really purified? You can just get water from your taps and just, you know, take it down your throat and that will be OK? Because in my country, purification of water is a problem, whereby there's dirty water, which causes the diseases. We have to purify our water using chemicals. Basically, we have to purify our water before we drink it, or we basically just boil it - if it comes from the tap, we boil it, then from there, and we can drink it."

18-year-old Josephine Mwatibo from Kenya is attending the World Water Forum that's now under way in Mexico City.