Safe and sufficient drinking-water, along with adequate sanitation and hygiene have implications across all Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) – from eradicating poverty and hunger, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health,
combating infectious diseases, increasing school attendance, to ensuring environmental sustainability. Much progress has been
achieved over the past decade:
• 2.3 billion people gained access to improved drinking-water between 1990–20121
.
• The number of children dying from diarrhoeal diseases, which are strongly associated with poor water, inadequate sanitation
and hygiene, has steadily fallen over the two last decades from approximately 1.5 million deaths in 1990 to just above 600,000
in 2012.2
As the world turns its attention to the formulation of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) much remains to be
done particularly to reduce inequalities across populations:
• 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation.
• 1 billion people practice open defecation, nine out of ten in rural areas1
.
• 748 million people lack access to improved drinking-water and it is estimated that 1.8 billion people use a source of drinkingwater
that is faecally contaminated1
.
• Hundreds of millions of people have no access to soap and water to wash their hands, preventing a basic practice that would
empower them to block the spread of disease