One out of three globally lack access to sanitation facilities: WHO

Around 2.4 billion people, or one out of every three inhabitants in the world, lack access to sanitation facilities, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF said on Tuesday.

Of those, 946 million are forced to defecate outdoors, a very unhygenic practice, as in many places it leads to disease and water supply pollution.

According to Maria Neira, director of the WHO Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health, until everyone had access to adequate sanitation facilities, the quality of water supplies would be undermined and too many people would continue to die from waterborne and water-related diseases.

The UN refers to adequate sanitation as an entire system that hygienically separates human excrement from the population. One of its Millennium Development Goals is the reduction by of the number of people without access to such a system by 2015.

That meant, 77 per cent of the world population should now have access to sanitation, a goal that would fall short by around some 9 percentage points, or 700 million people.

The UNICEF and WHO, also point out that the lack of progress in this area also threatened to undermine child survival and the health benefits that were expected to be achieved by improving access to drinking water.

The joint report evaluated progress on global targets set in 2000 for giving everyone access to clean drinking water and sanitation facilities, along with other goals in areas such as poverty, hunger, disease and inequality.

With those benchmarks set to expire this year, the UN is leading efforts have a new set of "sustainable development goals" that would be expected to focus on how some $2.5 trillion in development funds would be spent through 2030.

The report said past efforts to improve water and sanitation had seen some success with 2.1 billion people gaining access to better sanitation facilities since 1990, according to the report.

India was the worst sufferer, with over 640 million people defecating in the open, but not necessarily due to a lack of facilities. Many men who had installed toilets at home, still preferred going outdoors as they surveyed their farmlands or sought some quiet moments.