BOND working group, UK Water Network, believes that immediate action must be taken.
This is an important year for the world’s poor. The United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation, and throughout it End Water Poverty campaign will be highlighting, and working hard to change, the scandalous fact that over 2.6 billion people – 40% of the world’s population – do not have a safe, clean or private place to go to the toilet.
Sanitation is in crisis. There is compelling evidence that sanitation brings the greatest returns on investment of any development intervention (roughly US$9 for every US$1 spent). Yet it remains one of the most neglected and off-track of the UN Millennium Development Goal targets (agreed by all world governments to halve poverty by 2015).
Clean water and sanitation is in crisis