Sustainable Sanitation
The urgency for action in the sanitation sector is obvious, considering the 2.6 billion people world-wide who remain without access to any kind of improved sanitation, and the 2.2 million annual deaths (mostly children under the age of 5) caused mainly by sanitation-related diseases and poor hygienic conditions.
The United Nations, during the Millennium Summit in New York in 2000 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, developed a series of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aiming to achieve poverty eradication and sustainable development. The specific target set for the provision of water supply and sanitation services is to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation by 2015.
The Joint Monitoring Programme 99 (JMP) of the WHO and UNICEF reported in 2004 that the number of people lacking basic sanitation services rose from 2.1 billion in 2001 to 2.6 billion by 2004. As the JMP and the UNDP Human Development Report (2006) have shown, the progress towards meeting the MDG sanitation target is however much too slow, with an enormous gap existing between the intended coverage and today’s reality especially in Sub-Sahara Africa and parts of Asia as it can be seen in the amp showing the relative sizes for each country and the necessary construction of improved sanitation installations until 2015.
The reasons for this are numerous. A major issue is the fact that sanitation rarely benefits from the political attention given to other topics despite its key importance on many other sectors and on all other MDGs. Political will has been sorely lacking when it comes to placing sanitation high on the international development agenda. This has pushed sanitation into the shadows of water supply projects for example, and limited innovation in the sector.
Map showing the relative size of the MDG sanitation target for each country based on the number of installations required through to 2015
Read more about Sustainable Sanitation: Concepts of Sustainability in Sanitation, Recommendations To Make Current Sanitation More Sustainable, See Also