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Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2015 Update
Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2015 Update

Since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals, the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation has reported on progress towards achieving Target 7c: reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. 
The report details global progress towards the MDG target for drinking water and sanitation and  provides the latest estimates of progress in water and sanitation coverage at the sub-national, national, regional and global levels.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the framework that has been a key part of efforts to build a better world for the past 15 years – challenged the global community to reduce by half the proportion of the population without safe drinking water and basic sanitation. Throughout this period, the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) has monitored progress.
As the MDG era comes to a close, this report shows how far we have come. For example, in a major global achievement, the target for safe drinking water was met in 2010, well ahead of the MDG deadline of 2015. Over 90 per cent of the world’s population now has access to improved sources of drinking water.
At the same time, the report highlights how far we still have to go. The world has fallen short on the sanitation target, leaving 2.4 billion without access to improved sanitation facilities. The JMP has also tracked and presented data that shed light on a number of other issues, including inequalities such as the gap between urban and rural residents, the gender burden of water collection and the persistent exclusion of the poor from water and sanitation services. The insights provided by the JMP data have enabled us to identify specific challenges and strengthen policy-making. For instance, we have seen that we must address not only the widespread need for sanitation, but also the difficult problem of open defecation, still practiced by almost a billion people. Open defecation is one of the clearest manifestations of extreme poverty. 

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