Financing household on-site sanitation for the poor : WSP Sanitation Global Practice Team

Forty percent of the world’s people do not have access to a basic level of sanitation; one in five of us practices open defecation. This crisis in sanitation has clear consequences. Diarrhea kills more than 1.5 million children each year, and 88 percent of these deaths are attributed to fecal contamination from inadequate sanitation, hygiene, and water supply. The cost of these problems is high in economic as well as human terms. In a series of studies, the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) estimated that inadequate sanitation costs the economies of four Southeast Asian countries the equivalent of approximately 2 percent of their GDP3; these results echo similar findings elsewhere about both the costs and benefits of sanitation. [authors abstract]