Millennium Development Goals Summit

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight goals agreed by all 192 United Nations member states to tackle global poverty by the year 2015. The MDG targets related to water and sanitation are to halve, by 2015, the proportions of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

In September 2010, world leaders will come together at the UN for the MDG+10 Summit to review progress on the MDGs, identify priorities and plan actions to secure progress over the five years remaining until the 2015 MDG deadline.

Current trends predict that many of the poorest countries will still not have met the water target by 2050 unless efforts are scaled up. If current rates of progress continue, the global sanitation goal will be met 30 years too late – that’s a billion people too late.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the sanitation target will not be met for nearly 200 years. This makes sanitation the second most off-track MDG in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This water and sanitation crisis is holding back improvements across all other MDGs including education and maternal and child health, affecting not only human development but also economic growth. To prevent other development efforts from being undermined, we need world leaders to take firm action to reverse the global water and sanitation crisis before it's too late.

WaterAid will use the September 2010 MDG Summit as an opportunity to take this message to world leaders and encourage them to re-double efforts to meet the MDG targets on water and sanitation.

WaterAid will lobby the US Government to integrate water and sanitation interventions into initiatives on food security, child and maternal health, education, and climate change to ensure that these initiatives succeed. We will also ask the US Government to provide more and better aid for water, sanitation, and hygiene and to develop a comprehensive strategy for delivering this aid that maximizes impact on the world’s poorest people.