Sanitation

For every $1 spent on sanitation, up to $9 is returned in reduced healthcare burden and increased productivity.

Credit: WaterAid / Caroline Irby

Sanitation can be defined as access to safe, clean and effective human urine and faeces disposal facilities. Worldwide, 2.6 billion people live without this essential service and the resulting diarrhoeal diseases kill almost 5,000 children a day. Sanitation, along with safe water and knowledge of good hygiene practices, can reduce incidences of these illnesses by 65%.

Socially, the wider impacts of a lack of sanitation are severe. Sick adults cannot go out to work and adolescent girls stay away from school when they are menstruating. For women and girls in general, having nowhere clean or private to go to the toilet can expose them to health risks and even abuse and attack.
 
Economically, the cost of inadequate sanitation is huge. The UN estimates that the cost of not meeting the Millennium Development Goal target of halving the proportion of people living without access to sanitation is almost $35 billion per year. At the current rate of progress, the target will not be reached in sub-Saharan Africa until 2076.

There is compelling evidence to suggest that sanitation brings the single greatest return on investment of any development intervention. For every $1 spent on sanitation, up to $9 is returned in reduced healthcare burden and increased productivity.

And yet, the sanitation sector in developing countries at all levels has been characterised by political neglect. WaterAid believes this can be attributed to a scandalous lack of political will to push through changes that affect the poorest and most vulnerable people.

Sanitation is vital in reducing poverty. Our research and advocacy work in this area is towards realising our vision of universal access to this basic human right through sanitation's inclusion as an integral part of all development efforts.

WaterAid and other researchers have extensively documented the health implications of poor sanitation, but much less is known about its economic consequences. Our research aims to address this and make a powerful case for the reversal of the political neglect and decline in spending on this most fundamental of human needs.