Much has been done to ensure that every citizen of planet earth has access to potable water and sanitation, as per the Millennium Development Goals, but how far have we really come in attaining this?
How many people still go to the toilet in the open, and how many do still not have access to potable water? While great strides have been made, we still have a ways to go, and we only have five years in which to do it.
How Far Are We With Providing Clean Water And Sanitation To Everyone?
According to data gathered by the WHO/Unicef Joint Monitoring Programme, which has been gathering information and has tracked progress of the global effort to rescue the number of those without since 2009, approximately 946 million people around the world still go to the toilet out in the open.
Eritrea tops this list with approximately 77% of its population still defecating in the open, which can lead to contamination of water sources used for drinking purposes and the spread of water-related diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera, hepatitis A, dysentery, and typhoid.
Ethiopia, Eritrea’s neighbour, has made a concerted effort to reduce the practice of open defecation, and has made great inroads with the percentage of those defecating in the public decreasing from 92% in 1990 to 29% in 2015. This was achieved with the cooperation of the government and various donors contributing to the sanitation sector.
Approximately 82% of those living in cities have access to improved sanitation facilities while only around 51% of those living in rural areas have access to similar facilities. I t is estimated that around 2.4 billion people globally still lack improved sanitation, with most of them being situated in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Latin America. Rapid population growth and insufficient progress has meant that since 2009, numbers of individuals without access to sanitation has actually increased to 17% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa.
Effectively then, the MDG target to extend access to improved sanitation from 54% of the global population in 2000 to 77% in 2015 has not been met; it has actually been missed by approximately 700 million people, with 57 countries having made “no or limited†progress.
Ensuring access to potable water has made better progress with 91% of the global population now having access as opposed to 76% in 1990.
While we have made progress, we still need to do much more and more quickly. There are still too many people without access to clean water and sanitation.
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