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Water and Sanitation
Water
Affordable, abundant and clean water is essential for human well-being. There are clear linkages between access to potable water and health, nutrition, education achievement, labor productivity and economic growth. However, as many as 500 million urban residents lack reliable access to clean and affordable water services, or experience water scarcity. The World Bank reports that "some 25% of the urban population of Latin America and at least 50% of the urban population of Africa are not connected to official utility networks and rely on alternative sources for their water supply." In many cities demand for water, at current tariff levels, greatly outstrips supply, resulting in water management strategies that deliver water to households only for a few hours each day or on certain days of the week. Given the pressures of urban population growth, especially of low-income families that construct dwellings at the urban fringe far removed from main trunk lines, providing adequate supplies of safe water will remain one of the biggest urban challenges in the coming decades.
In order for the goal of universal water access to be achieved, water utilities must be financially healthy. However, aging distribution systems impose high economic costs for resource-strapped urban water and sanitation service (WSS) providers. It is common for 40% or more of all water that enters the distribution system to be unaccounted for due to theft, illegal hook-ups, abuses of the right to free water, and, most importantly, leakage, either through public mains or household connections. Some urban water systems in Eastern Europe have found as many as 90% of consumer meters are non-functioning, making it impossible to establish efficient pricing systems. However, often a quick diagnosis of water supply and distribution systems reveal small investment opportunities that have high economic paybacks, resulting in savings that can be invested back into the system through expansion or modernization. One of the key ways for municipalities to realize these savings is to involve private sector actors or utilize private sector principles (see Involving the Private Sector)
Sanitation
While access to water is critical for creating vibrant communities, access to proper sanitation is equally so. Globally some 2.5 billion people do not have access to improved sanitation, and every day as many as 30,000 people die from preventable water- and hygiene-related diseases. At any given time almost half the urban population of developing countries is affected, with more than 2 million deaths annually from diarrheal diseases. Additionally, many millions more are debilitated, preventing them from becoming fully productive members of society.
However, achieving universal piped wastewater sanitation will be difficult and expensive - simply maintaining the current percentage of the urban population with access to improved sanitation over the next 15 years will require extending access to over 800 million urban residents. And, piped wastewater systems are often too costly to apply on a broad scale, particularly in informal urban settlements, due to the infrastructural and geographic constraints and connection fees that individual poor households often lack the capacity to pay. Many countries therefore assign a lower priority for sanitation, partly as a result of the high investment costs and partly because of the lower perceived benefits (individual and societal) of sanitation services compared to water supply investments. As a result, global sanitation investment expenditures are less than those for water supply, comprising only 20% of the total invested in the water and sanitation development sector.
Water and Sanitation Systems
However, wastewater collection and treatment is only one component of sanitation. In addition to improved water supply and wastewater collection, improved sanitation requires that "software" investments also be made. Programming aimed at changing sanitary and hygiene behaviors, such as hand-washing and proper disposal of children?s waste, greatly reduce morbidity and mortality rates from hygiene-related diseases, achieving public health impacts that are more immediate, cost-effective, and more equitably spread throughout society than from making of wastewater "hardware" investments alone. Experience over the last few decades has shown that, because sanitation and wastewater treatment are inextricably linked as part of the same water supply and sanitation cycle, returns on investments made in water and sanitation together are three times higher than investments made in either component alone. In addition, in order to achieve the maximum benefits from these initiatives, institutional coordination, widespread stakeholder participation and collaborative, multi-sectoral partnerships are often required.
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