Background on the Water and Sanitation Crisis

Globally, 884 million people still lack access to a safe water supply. That means one out of every eight people on the planet struggle on a daily basis to safely meet their water needs. What’s more 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation; this figure includes 1.2 billion people who have no facilities at all. Diarrhea remains the second leading cause of death among children under five globally. Nearly one in five child deaths – about 1.5 million each year – is due to diarrhea. It kills more young children than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. Every 20 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease.

Lack of access to clean water and basic sanitation facilities creates significant costs in terms of illness and lost time. The United Nations’ 2006 Human Development Report estimates the total economic benefits of meeting the water and sanitation targets in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – halving the proportion of people without access to safe water and sanitation by 2015 – would be approximately $38 billion annually.

Current grant-based finance models and present aid levels have not provided enough resources to solve the problem. Estimates of amount of investment required vary depending on the methodology, but studies have put the amount to meet the water and sanitation MDGs in the range of $9 to $30 billion USD annually.

This is not a crisis waiting on a medical or technological breakthrough. The solutions already exist and are extremely low-tech. Rather, the primary constraint is financial capital. The average cost to get a person access to safe water is low (typically $15 to $40, depending upon a number of factors). However, the magnitude of the problem is so large that philanthropic capital alone will never solve it.

Visit Water.org’s Water Facts to learn more: http://water.org/learn-about-the-water-crisis/facts/