Health through safe drinking water and basic sanitation

Abstract

Achieving Millennium Development Goal target 10, which aims to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015, requires raising global drinking water coverage from 77% in 1990 to 88.5% in 2015 and increasing access to improved sanitation from 58% to 75% over the same period. As of 2002, global coverage had reached 83% for water and 58% for sanitation, suggesting that the drinking water target is likely to be met except in sub-Saharan Africa. However, reaching the sanitation target will require an unprecedented effort, as 2.6 billion people lacked access to basic sanitation in 2002, and current trends indicate that the world will miss the target by more than half a billion people. Meeting the target would avert 470 thousand deaths and result in an extra 320 million productive working days every year, with economic benefits ranging from US$ 3 to US$ 34 for each dollar invested – AI-generated abstract.