The sanitation issue
Around the world, 2,6 billion people do not have a clean and safe place to use for performing their bodily functions - they lack that basic necessity, a toilet. This hidden global scandal constitutes an affront to human dignity on a massive scale.
 To put the spotlight on sanitation the UN General Assembly declared the year 2008 the International Year of Sanitation. The goal is to raise awareness and to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to reduce by half the proportion of the 2,6 billion people without access to basic sanitation by 2015.
WSSCC & Global Sanitation Fund
 The Water Supply & Sanitation Collaborative Council ( WSSCC) is a global membership organisation that works to improve the lives of poor people in developing countries. WSSCC enhances collaboration among water, sanitation and hygiene agencies and professionals and hence contributes to the broader goals of poverty eradication, health and environmental improvement, gender equality, social and economic development. The WSSCC has been established by the United Nations.
WSSCC's mandate covers both water supply and sanitation. However, since the number of people without sanitation is much larger than those without water and since most organisations working in water and sanitation actually devote most of their resources to water, WSSCC has deliberately emphasized sanitation and hygiene.
Sanitation & hygiene keep people healthy
Good sanitation and hygiene, together with safe drinking water, have long been recognized as essential to keeping people healthy. Yet today, although sanitation has been called the greatest medical advance of the past 150 years, 2.6 billion people or about 40% of the world’s population do not have access to basic sanitation. The consequences in terms of human suffering and economic loss are enormous. To help meet the goal of ensuring improved sanitation and hygiene for all, the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) has created the Global Sanitation Fund.
The purpose of the Global Sanitation Fund is to help large numbers of poor people to attain safe and sustainable sanitation services and adopt good hygiene practices. The Global Sanitation Fund is a single pooled fund open to contribution from any source including governments, foundations, private sector and individuals. The money is allocated to Executing Agencies in carefully selected countries, which then grant funds to Sub-Grantees who implement the sanitation and hygiene work programmes agreed for each country. The whole system is being closely monitored by WSSCC, as well as in country and global audit mechanisms.
Read more about the Year of Sanitation >
Sanitary facts
Toilets may seem like an unlikely catalyst for human progress—but the evidence that they are is overwhelming. Almost everyone living in the developed world has access to a private, flush toilet served by a continuous supply of piped water—with taps and toilets in close proximity. Human waste is channeled by pipes into sewerage systems and treatment facilities, ensuring that drinking water is separated from the pathogens carried in faecal material.
Meanwhile, taps located in sanitation facilities enable people to maintain personal hygiene. But at the other end of the sanitation spectrum are the millions of people forced to defecate in bags, buckets, fields or roadside ditches. If the developed country model were the benchmark, the number of people lacking sanitation would be far higher than that recorded by World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) data. The global deficit would soar from 2.6 billion people to about 4 billion.
Sanitation is the most important medical advance since 1840, according to a reader survey in the British Medical Journal. Improved sanitation reduces cholera, worms, diarrhoea, pneumonia and malnutrition, among other maladies, that cause disease and death in millions of people. Today 2.6 billion people, including almost one billion children, live without even basic sanitation. Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of poor sanitation. That’s 1.5 million preventable deaths each year.
Improved sanitation has positive impacts on economic growth and poverty reduction. According to a recent WHO study, every dollar spent on improving sanitation generates an average economic benefit of $7. The economic cost of inaction is astronomical. Without improving sanitation, none of the other Millennium Development Goals, to which the world has committed itself, will be achieved.
Sanitation enhances dignity, privacy and safety, especially for women and girls. It improves convenience and social status. Sanitation in schools enables children, especially girls reaching puberty, to remain in the educational system. Restricted toilet opportunities increase the chance of chronic constipation and is making women vulnerable to violence if they are forced to defecate during nightfall and in secluded areas. Providing improved sanitation facilities is a liberating development for women and girls and is providing substantial benefits for the whole community.
Improved disposal of human waste protects the quality of drinking water sources. Re-use of composted waste for agriculture is an environmental, as well as economic, gain. At present, each year more than 200 million tonnes of human waste – and vast quantities of waste water and solid waste – go uncollected and untreated around the world, fouling the environment and exposing millions of people to disease and squalor.
Now is the time to act. The technologies, approaches and skilled people are ready. Households, communities, local and national governments, civil society, and private companies all need to work together. Media and public opinion around the world can influence political leaders to act now. The estimated $10 billion annual cost to halve the proportion of people without basic sanitation by 2015 (this is the sanitation MDG target) is modest and affordable. If sustained, the same investment could achieve basic sanitation for the entire world within one or two decades. This sum is less than 1% of world military spending in 2005, one-third of the estimated global spending on bottled water, or about as much as Europeans spend on ice cream each year. |
