Largely ignored by international media and severely neglected by development actors and governments at national and international level, the world is facing an epic crisis in access to safe drinking water and sanitation: in 2010, lack of access to clean drinking water and a toilet still kills more children than malaria, measles and HIV/AIDS combined.

Globally, one in seven people lack access to even minimum supplies of safe water for basic personal and domestic needs. These individuals are left with no choice but to drink water obtained from unsafe sources such as unprotected wells, rivers or lakes. The situation is even worse with regard to sanitation. Almost 40% of the world population have no access to sanitation that ensures health, physical safety, privacy and dignity. For want of a toilet, billions have no option but to defecate in buckets, plastic bags and public places in and around their communities.

The consequences are drastic:

• Preventable diseases caused by dirty water and poor sanitation kill more than 4,000 children under the age of five every day.
• At any given time almost half of the people in developing countries are suffering from one or more of the main diseases caused by dirty water and poor sanitation, such as diarrhoea, guinea worm, trachoma and schistosomiasis.
• Approximately 443 million school days are lost every year because pupils and teachers are down with preventable diseases rather than in school studying for a better future.
• Due to a lack of safe and private sanitation facilities, millions of young girls stay out of school during menstruation or drop out of school completely.

Global economic damage

Furthermore, lack of access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene severely undermines efforts to achieve sustainable economic development. The global economic damage caused by diseases and productivity losses related to unclean water and poor sanitation is estimated at a staggering $170 billion per year with developing countries bearing the brunt of the burden.