Abstract
Safe drinking water and sanitation are important determinants of human health and wellbeing and have recently been declared human rights by the international community. Increased access to both were included in the Millennium Development Goals under a single dedicated target for 2015. This target was reached in 2010 for water but sanitation will fall short; however, there is an important difference in the benchmarks used for assessing global access. For drinking water the benchmark is community-level access whilst for sanitation it is household-level access, so a pit latrine shared between households does not count toward the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target. We estimated global progress for water and sanitation under two scenarios: with equivalent household- and community-level benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that the “sanitation deficit” is apparent only when household-level sanitation access is contrasted with community-level water access. When equivalent benchmarks are used for water and sanitation, the global deficit is as great for water as it is for sanitation, and sanitation progress in the MDG-period (1990–2015) outstrips that in water. As both drinking water and sanitation access yield greater benefits at the household-level than at the community-level, we conclude that any post–2015 goals should consider a household-level benchmark for both.
Highlights
In 2012, the United Nations (UN) Secretary General declared that the water component of Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target 7c, to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water, had been met, five years ahead of the 2015 deadline [1]
This study uses the same data sources used by the World Health Organization (WHO)/United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) to assess national, regional and global progress toward the water and sanitation MDG target
We were able to estimate whether the MDG target, refashioned in accordance with these alternative benchmarks, would be met under these two scenarios
Summary
In 2012, the United Nations (UN) Secretary General declared that the water component of MDG target 7c, to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water, had been met, five years ahead of the 2015 deadline [1]. Whereas 780 million people are estimated to lack access to an ‘improved’ source of drinking water, an estimated 2.5 billion lack access to an ‘improved’ sanitation facility [2]. This apparent deficit, with global progress on extending access to safe sanitation lagging behind that of water, has been coined the ‘sanitation crisis’ and has contributed to various calls to action being issued [3]. Keeping the water target at the level of the community may have been considered a progressive measure to incentivize reaching those with distant and unsafe water, rather than improving the level of access of those already served at the community-level through subsidized household connections
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