01942nas a2200169 4500000000100000008004100001100001400042700001400056700001300070700001400083245016600097856007700263300001200340490000600352520140000358022001401758 2014 d1 aCumming O1 aElliott M1 aOverbo A1 aBartram J00aDoes global progress on sanitation really lag behind water? An analysis of global progress on community- and household-level access to safe water and sanitation. uhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4263671/pdf/pone.0114699.pdf ae1146990 v93 a

Safe drinking water and sanitation are important determinants of human health and wellbeing and have recently been declared human rights by the international community. Increased access to both were included in the Millennium Development Goals under a single dedicated target for 2015. This target was reached in 2010 for water but sanitation will fall short; however, there is an important difference in the benchmarks used for assessing global access. For drinking water the benchmark is community-level access whilst for sanitation it is household-level access, so a pit latrine shared between households does not count toward the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target. We estimated global progress for water and sanitation under two scenarios: with equivalent household- and community-level benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that the "sanitation deficit" is apparent only when household-level sanitation access is contrasted with community-level water access. When equivalent benchmarks are used for water and sanitation, the global deficit is as great for water as it is for sanitation, and sanitation progress in the MDG-period (1990-2015) outstrips that in water. As both drinking water and sanitation access yield greater benefits at the household-level than at the community-level, we conclude that any post-2015 goals should consider a household-level benchmark for both.

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