In the report, Health, Dignity, and Development: What Will It Take?, and the abridged version published with support of the Swedish Water House, the Task Force underscores the need to focus on the global sanitation crisis, which contributes to the death of 3,900 children each day, to increase access to domestic water supply, and to invest in integrated development and management of water resources. All are necessary for countries to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals and reduce poverty and hunger, improve health, advance gender equality, and ensure environmental sustainability. The report says the Millennium Development Goals on water and sanitation can be achieved if there are:
- Deliberate commitments by donors to increase and refocus their development assistance and to target sufficient aid to the poorest low-income countries,
- Deliberate commitments by governments of middle-income countries that do not depend on aid to reallocate their resources so that they target funding to their unserved poor,
- Deliberate activities to create support and ownership for water supply and sanitation initiatives among both women and men in poor communities, and a
- Deliberate recognition that basic sanitation in particular requires an approach that centres on community mobilization and actions that support and encourage that mobilization.
The Task Force also said that deliberate planning and investment in sound water resources management and infrastructure is a critical requirement. Further, ten critical actions were identified for achieving the water and sanitation target and fostering the sound management of water resources for all the Goals.
The report shows how poverty, hunger, environmental problems and diseases would be directly combated and significantly scaled back if fought with water and sanitation access as a primary goal; child and maternal mortality rates would drop; and other important issues, including education and gender equality, would indirectly benefit from achievement of the safe drinking water and basic sanitation targets identified within the MDGs.
A recent cost-benefit analysis by the World Health Organization found that achieving the global Millennium Development target on water and sanitation would bring substantial economic gains: each $1 invested would yield an economic return of between $3 and $34, depending on the region. Achieving the water and sanitation target would cost on average $6.7 billion per year until 2015 – less than half what Europe and the United States spend annually on pet food ($17 billion).
Implementing the recommendations of this report will allow all countries to halve the proportion of people without access to safe water and sanitation by 2015. This abridged report was prepared by the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Water and Sanitation and published by the Swedish Water House, an initiative of the Government of Sweden which is administered by the Stockholm International Water Institute and which supports international policy development and cooperation on water. The abridged report is the only abridged version produced for any of the Millennium Project task force full final reports.
In support of achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Mark Malloch Brown, launched the Millennium Project to recommend the best strategies for achieving the MDGs. Over a period of three years the Millennium Project worked to devise a recommended plan of implementation that will allow all developing countries to meet the Millennium Development Goals and thereby substantially improve the human condition by 2015.
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