Envisioning a World With Sanitation For All

Safe drinking water and basic sanitation are essential to human health. While the two are often lumped together under the acronym WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene), we here at the Skoll Foundation see them as distinct, though closely related issues.

The world achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water in 2010, ahead of schedule, but sanitation lags far behind, with 2.5 billion people still lacking access to improved sanitation.

There are a host of explanations that contribute to this gap:

Unrealized demand. Most people understand the importance of clean water for wellbeing, but there is often a lack of understanding about why sanitation services, too, are essential for good health.


Behavior change is hard. For those not accustomed to using toilets or washing their hands, it takes extra effort to help them change their ways.


Sanitation systems are complex. Effective sanitation services require coordination between actors at different steps, from developing customer demand, to delivering services, to removing the waste.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), set to be finalized later this year, are expected to include universal access to clean water and sanitation by 2030. The goal is ambitious, and if the world is to meet it, there is some significant catch-up to do on sanitation.

Momentum is building, led in particular by the Clean India campaign’s pledge that everyone in that country will have access to a toilet by 2019. This is an enormous undertaking. Though thousands of toilets have been built as a part of the campaign, a number of early reports mention difficulties with getting people to use them, to the point where the city of Ahmedabad is actually implementing a one rupee reward system for residents who use public toilets.

The funding landscape has presented challenges as well. More funding is consistently directed towards water provision, despite the fact that the needs are greater in sanitation.

The goal of reaching universal sanitation access seems daunting, especially considering that the world did not meet the less ambitious MDG of halving the proportion of the world lacking access to improved sanitation services.

Given that sanitation has much further to go but still garners less attention and funding than clean water, how can the WASH sector accelerate to achieve universal sanitation access by 2030? What low-cost models must be embraced, and by whom?

At the Skoll Foundation, we see social entrepreneurs making a difference in the lives of those who are underserved by existing sanitation solutions:

They help develop community-led solutions, engaging with local governments and service providers to understand the business case for extending coverage to the poor.


They mobilize capital from the investment community to increase financing for services.


They monitor the solutions that have been put into place to track the durability of their interventions.


They empower local entrepreneurs and community groups to manage and maintain the systems that have been put in place.

In the rest of this series, we will hear more about some of these approaches, and the perspectives of some of the leading organizations in the sector on how we can achieve universal access to sanitation by 2030.