<p>At the close of 2011, 768 million people did not have access to clean water and 2.5 billion people lacked access to sanitation: that's 20 times and 65 times the population of California, respectively. Water borne diseases are often fatal in poor communities where people cannot afford treatment: diarrhea alone kills over 100,000 children a year. Brighter Dawns works in the poorest communities, the slums, in the sixth most populated country in the world - Bangladesh - to bring clean water and sanitary facilities, supplies and education. Brighter Dawns partners with NGOs to fix wells they built, now in disrepair, and works with the community in building wells, latrines and bathing rooms for women who are otherwise vulnerable when bathing in public. They hire and train Community Health Workers from the slum community to hold seminars on hygiene and maintain the facilities constantly. They are working to maintain facilities in the long term, avoiding the problem common to regional NGOs of letting past projects fall into disrepair until the improvements they made are gone. The team's latest project is to repair broken wells and latrines in a slum area known as Ward 12 of Khalishpur, Bangladesh.&nbsp;</p>