The recently released WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) report "Progress on Sanitation and Drinking-Water –2010", confirms that 87% of the world’s population now has safe drinking water sources.
Although that is good news, the report also states that 39 percent of the world’s population is still living without improved sanitation facilities. If this trend continues, the international community will miss the 2015 sanitation Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by almost one billion people.
In an unfortunate twist, the proliferation of potable water is creating a new problem. Once water is made available to a community, there also has to be a means of taking volumes of dirtied or 'grey' water away. Without proper drainage, puddles and filthy ponds create new breeding-grounds for disease.
An important difficulty in addressing the crisis is that the economies and settlement patterns of many slums and virtually all rural areas of the developing world cannot support the installation of sewerage. Neither governments nor communities have the necessary resources for installation or maintenance, and there is no incentive for the organized commercial sector to get involved.
The conventional industrial solutions for sanitation cannot be applied in a majority of settings due to high costs, as well as topographical and technological impracticality.
To address this crisis, governments and the public sector must become energized and work together on the solution. They need to:
• Understand existing demands for sanitation, and what limits it;
• Work to overcome those limits,
• Stimulate development of appropriate technology that meets the needs of the rural poor and other groups without access to out of modern sanitation,
• Regulate and coordinate the transport and final disposal of wastes in a sustainable and cost effective manner.
Achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) target on sanitation could yield around $9 for every dollar spent. WHO estimates that meeting their Sanitation Goal would save $66 billion by 2015.
"We all recognize the vital importance of water and sanitation to human health and well-being and their role as an engine of development. The question now lies in how to accelerate progress towards achieving the MDG targets and most importantly how to leap a step further to ultimately achieve the vision of universal access", said Dr Maria Neira, WHO’s Director for the Department of Public Health and Environment.
"With almost 884 million people living without access to safe drinking-water and approximately three times that number lacking basic sanitation, we must act now as one global community to ensure water and sanitation for all," said Clarissa Brocklehurst, UNICEF Chief of the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH).
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