ABSTRACT
Whereas the financial, institutional, and technical constraints discussed in chapter 5 pertain to expanding both water supply and sanitation services, in practice, sanitation and hygiene receive substantially less attention, funding, and priority than water supply in virtually every country the world over. It should thus not be surprising that the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) has recently warned that, “[w]ithout a sharp acceleration in the rate of progress, the world will miss the sanitation target by half a billion people” (WHO/UNICEF JMP 2004, p. 14). The international community is dangerously off track from its goal of halving the proportion of people lacking even basic sanitation services by 2015.
