I'm really lucky. I lived to see my 28th birthday. I lived long enough to get married. I lived to have three beautiful, happy, healthy children. Here in the United States, or in Britain where I was born and raised, it might seem like an insignificant feat but really it's astonishing when you look at the statistics. The variables that mattered the most - place of birth and year of birth - were in my favor.

For starters I was born in 1991 in Britain where the child mortality rate was ~0.85%. That means I was 14x and 12x more likely to reach my fifth birthday than babies born in India (CMR: 12.2%) and Kenya (CMR: 10.5%).

I picked those countries as comps because my Mum and Dad were born there. The numbers looked bad in 1991 but they used to be a lot worse. My Mum was born in India in 1966, a year when ~22.6% of babies born didn't make it to their fifth birthday. My Dad was born in Kenya in 1960 and was part of the lucky 80% who reached their fifth birthday.

While the child mortality rate has steadily decreased over time, it's still really high in many parts of the developing world. There are a lot of factors which contribute to it, but dirty water is a major one.

Every day, about 1,400 children die from diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are simple solutions like drilled wells, spring protections and BioSand filters that help provide clean water to communities around the world.

So in lieu of presents on my birthday, I want to help a few more people around the world improve their chances of seeing their 5th and eventually 28th Birthday.

(Note: 100% of the money will be used to build clean water projects, and when they’re complete, charity: water will send us photos and GPS coordinates so we can see the exact community we helped.)