Progress for children : a report card on water and sanitation

Unsafe water and the lack of basic sanitation and adequate hygiene claim every year the lives of more than 1.5 million children under five years old from diarrhoeal diseases, pneumonia and undernutrition, and have implications for whether children, especially girls, attend school. This means that achieving Millennium Development Goal 7 and its target 2015 of reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation are of vital relevance for children and for improving nutrition, education and women’s status.

This report card measures the world’s performance in water and sanitation in order to investigate whether the Millennium Development Goals will be met. It projects that, with 83 per cent coverage of improved drinking-water sources in 2004, the world is on track to meet the target for drinking water of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water. But to meet the sanitation target it will have to double the rate of improvement since 1990.

Three regions, Latin America/Caribbean, East Asia/Pacific and Middle East/North African, are on track. The least progress was made in CEE/CIS where coverage froze at 84 per cent and in Eastern/Southern Africa, where access improved only slightly and where with population growth, the absolute number of people without sanitation increased by a third over the same period.

The key lessons learned and nine steps to reach the MDG targets, are presented in the endnote, together with elaborated statistics demonstrating the progress made.