Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene

Unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene are leading causes of illness and death in the developing world.

Diarrhea and other water-borne illnesses thrive where people don’t have safe water, adequate sanitation facilities, or effective handwashing routines. Every year 2.4 million people die from diarrhea and other water-related illnesses. One-quarter of all childhood deaths are caused by unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene.

These unhealthy conditions impose high costs on the poor, exacerbating poverty.

Poor households lose, on average, three hours every day searching for clean water or places to relieve themselves. That takes away time that could be spent at work or school. Over 9 percent of all illness in the developing world results from poor water, sanitation, and hygiene, leading to billions of days of lost work and missed school each year.

Poor women and girls suffer the greatest social consequences.

In many cultures, women and girls are responsible for traveling long distances to collect the family’s water. This leads to lost educational and income-generating opportunities. The absence of sanitation facilities at home put women at risk of attack in the open, while inadequate toilets at schools are a major deterrent to girls’ attendance, especially once they begin menstruating.

Providing access to basic services has long-term health and economic benefits for poor people in the developing world.

Ensuring reliable and affordable services can reduce illness and death from diarrhea and other water-borne illnesses, increase economic opportunities for households and communities, and improve school attendance, especially by girls.

Our goal is to help tens of millions of people in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa benefit from safe water, sanitation, and hygiene.

Next: Our Approach

We’re working with partners to expand access to safe water and sanitation for poor people in developing countries; to develop affordable and sustainable methods to deliver services; and to promote effective approaches. We’re supporting the following strategies:

Expand the use of proven solutions and strategies.

Innovative and effective work has been done on a small scale in many places. We’re supporting efforts to replicate the best solutions on a much broader scale. We want to help adapt a variety of successful approaches for widespread use, improving millions of lives.

Help improve the effectiveness of existing large-scale efforts.

Governments and donors provide significant water, sanitation, and hygiene funding and services. We’re partnering with them to identify more affordable, effective, and sustainable ways of providing services to the poor. For example, hardware, such as toilets and wells, is much more likely to be used and maintained when paired with community outreach. We’re working to help increase and expand these approaches by clearly demonstrating their value.

Support market-based approaches for providing services to the poor.

Businesses can often deliver products and services that respond to people's needs, at prices they can afford. We’re working to help businesses increase affordable options for the poor; for example, through kiosks that sell clean drinking water in rural areas for less than a penny a day. Such approaches can help improve the quality, lower the costs, expand the availability, and increase the sustainability of water, sanitation, and hygiene services.

Invest in research and development.

We’re funding research that tackles key questions and brings new insight to the field, particularly in the neglected area of sanitation. We’re also supporting innovations on a broad range of products and services. For example, we’re helping develop a low-cost, easy-to-use test that could reduce illness and save lives by letting people know if the water they’re using is safe.

Increase awareness of the issue and support the development of effective policies.

Water, sanitation and hygiene interventions have been consistently neglected, despite their critical importance. We’re working to call attention to the need and value of safe water, sanitation, and hygiene—and to help policy—and decisionmakers deliver better results for poor people in developing countries.