Declining access 

Even where sanitation facilities are available, they are often woefully inadequate. In Kampala in the 1980s, for example, as many as 40 people were using each city latrine. Given the volume of use, inevitably such public latrines are filthy, attracting swarms of disease-bearing insects and frequently overflowing, particularly during storms. 

I try to take comfort from what good news there is, and the success in expanding access to safe water stands in stark contrast to the shameful failure in sanitation. By 1994, three quarters of the world’s people had access to safe water, up from 61 per cent just four years earlier. This is crucial, as safe water is a key part of the sanitation equation. But during the same period, the proportion of people who had a sanitary means of excreta disposal declined from 36 to 34 per cent. 
 

Children's health suffers in the absence of hygienic sanitation. The problem is exaggerated in refugee camps, such as this one near Goma (Democratic Republic of Congo), during the Rwanda emergency.

This decline should set off an alarm. It tells me that the world community is far off track and, just three years before the millennium, has no hope of achieving its goal of providing adequate sanitation to everyone on earth by the year 2000. Access rates are low partly because some countries have tightened their definitions of what constitutes adequate sanitation. While it is good news that standards are being raised, the fact that the minimum standard is now a notch higher does not excuse governments for their failure to provide such a fundamental human necessity to all their people at the end of the 20th century.

Hopes for increasing access to sanitation began to erode in the 1980s, years that many have called the ‘lost decade’ of development, when many poor countries found their budgets stretched thin from making payments on enormous international loans. 

In Africa, for example, 22 per cent of the total value of exports in 1990 went to debt repayment. In addition, many economies underwent the shock therapy of structural adjustment programmes called for by the Bretton Woods institutions and donor nations. Public expenditures, and often basic services, were cut. 

The numbers show what happened. In Nairobi, capital expenditures for water and sewerage fell by a factor of 10, from $27.78 per capita in 1981 to $2.47 in 1987, and per capita maintenance expenditures declined by two thirds. In Zimbabwe, close to one quarter of village water pumps fell into disrepair when the Government slashed maintenance funds from $12 per water site in 1988 to $5.30 in 1990. The incidence of cholera and dysentery surged in Kinshasa for several months in 1995 when funds for water chlorination ran out. 
 
 

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