H2O-Va?

Now that he's grown, it looks like Jay-Z has decided to focus on humanitarian issues--most specifically, the worldwide water crisis. USA Today provides the following report:

Jay-Z, president of Def Jam Records, teamed up with the United Nations and MTV on Wednesday to get children involved in the fight against the worldwide water crisis. He cited statistics that 1.1 billion people live without clean drinking water and 2.6 billion lack proper sanitation. "I figure that once I stumbled upon that, if the information was out and young people knew that these problems exist while we're having Poland Springs at Cipriani and things like that, that we'll get involved," said the 36-year-old rapper, referring to the high-class restaurant chain. Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, said he had been looking for a way to help people, and when he visited Africa on tour he was struck at how many of the world's poor lacked such a basic necessity. "As I started looking around and looking at ways that I could become helpful, it started at the first thing -- water, something as simple as water," he said at a news conference at U.N. headquarters. "It took very little, very little to see these numbers."

Even if this is a publicity stunt, it sure is a hell of a lot classier than a sex tape or a confession of an eating disorder. Go J.

More photos of Jay-Z at his news conference, after the jump.