Sustainable rural sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa: an essential contribution to reaching the MDGs and formulating the SDGs for the post 2015 development agenda?

This paper is structured in four main parts. The first part gives an introduction and entails an overview of geographical literature on sanitation particularly in rural areas of the Global South. A worldwide scale of access to appropriate sanitation shows the hot spots of unsatisfactory sanitation coverage. The second part describes factors and determinants of sustainable rural sanitations and their importance for successful and sustainable 

implementation. Part three further elaborates on the relationship between the neglect and improvement of sanitation in rural areas of SSA and its possible hazards and contributions to the overall achievement of the MDGs. Part four summarizes and discusses the findings, draws a conclusion and subsequently elaborates a short outlook on possible future research questions in the field of rural geography, which will be interesting for the upcoming post 2015 sustainable development agenda. The overall aim of this paper is to indicate the importance of rural sanitation for the elaboration of the SDGs which will be pivotal for the next decade of development cooperation beyond 2015. [authors abstract]