It is rather difficult to believe in this day and age, but despite progress in hygienic drinking water and sanitation practices, approximately 2.4 billion people worldwide lack sanitation facilities, which includes around 946 million people who defecate in the open.
This lack of progress is undermining the child survival rate and setting all the health benefits gained from more individuals being able to access potable drinking water back.
WHO Report Finds a Lack of Sanitation is Holding Back Drinking Water Gains
According to a Joint Monitoring Programme report from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNICEF entitled Progress on sanitation and drinking water: 2015 update and MDG assessment, which tracks access to sanitation and potable drinking water globally against the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), access to better drinking water has much improved, but progress in hygienic sanitation lags woefully behind.
According to the report, around 2.6 billion people having gained access since 1990, which means that around 91% of the global population now have improved drinking water. This includes 427 million individuals in sub-Saharan Africa, which amounts to an average of 47,000 people per day every day for 25 years having gained access to cleaner drinking water.
This has translated into child survival rates experiencing substantial gains; today fewer than 1 000 children under the age of five die each day from diarrhoea caused by insufficient water, sanitation and hygiene, as compared to in excess of 2 000 deaths per day fifteen years ago.
This figure is still unacceptable though, and according to the report, even though approximately 2.1 billion individuals have gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, the MDG target was missed by almost 700 million people. This has been due to lack of affordable products for the poor, insufficient investment in behaviour change campaigns, and social norms that accept and even encourage defecating in the open. Only 68% of the global population uses improved sanitation facilities – nine percentage points below the MDG target of 77%.
Sanjay Wijesekera, head of UNICEF’s global water, sanitation and hygiene programmes, says that the focus needs to change from the rich to focusing on the inequalities if we are to achieve the new Sustainable Development Goals that will be set by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, which will include eliminating open defecation by 2030 – WHO and UNICEF say that this will require “a doubling of current rates of reduction, especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.â€
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