The sanitation lifecycle : a comprehensive approach to ensure sanitation for all forever (work in progress : version september 2011)

The fundamental fact is that 2.6 billion people remain without access to improved sanitation and, as a direct result 1.5 million children die annually from diarrhoeal illnesses. Historically, there has been – and in some places there remains – a focus on the provision of hardware; the primary or sole question being does a household have a toilet? This leads to an emphasis on locational coverage, what proportion of households in a district, region or country has access to a toilet. While this has provided useful indications of the scale of the sanitation problem, and therefore has helped with the major advocacy effort seen in the sanitation and hygiene sector in recent years, problems arise if this is pursued as the primary focus. [authors abstract]