CLEAN WATER AND SANITATION
FOR THE POORMore than a billion people lack access to clean drinking water and over 2.4 billion lack access to proper sanitary facilities. The result is that there are more people in the world’s hospitals today suffering from water-borne diseases than any other ailment. Some two million children die every year—6,000 a day—from such infections. Donors have committed significant resources to improve access to water and sanitation. While well short of the kind of sums that will eventually be needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals on water, this is a very encouraging start.The challenges ahead may be enormous, but there are success stories from all over the world that we can build on. — Mark Malloch Brown,Administrator of UNDP
General water usage increased six-fold over the past century, more than twice the rate at which the world’s population grew.More than two million tons of human waste are dumped daily into the world’s rivers, lakes and streams. In the next two decades, water use is expected to rise by 40 percent.
At least 1.2 billion people currently lack access to safe drinking water. In September 2000, at the UN Millennium Summit, world leaders committed themselves to a set of eight time-bound measurable Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); one of the objectives was to halve the proportion of people without access to clean drinking water.
But both the potable-water objective and the effort to increase access to proper sanitation for the 2.4 billion people now living without it will require greater support from developed nations, new policies and technologies in the developing world and improvement in the way water resources are used and managed worldwide.
Adapted from : United Nations Development Programme (March 2003)Water Fact Sheet