WHO/UNICEF Progress Report on Sanitation & Drinking Water
Some 2.4 billion people will remain without access to improved sanitation in 2015, according to a new joint WHO/UNICEF report.According to the report, the world remains off track to meet the Millennium Development goal (MDg) sanitation target.
Key findings
Among the key findings from the latest 2011 data, the report highlights:
- Almost two-thirds (64%) of the world’s population had access to improved sanitation facilities, an increase of almost 1.9 billion people since 1990.
- Approximately 2.5 billion people lacked access to an improved sanitation facility. Of these, 761 million use public or shared sanitation facilities and 693 million use facilities that do not meet minimum standards of hygiene.
- In 2011, one billion people still defecated in the open. 90% of all open defecation takes place in rural areas.
- By the end of 2011, 89% of the world population used an improved drinking-water source, and 55% had a piped supply on premises. This left an estimated 768 million people without improved sources for drinking water, of whom 185 million relied on surface water for their daily needs.
- There continues to be a striking disparity between those living in rural areas and those who live in cities. Urban dwellers make up three-quarters of those with access to piped water supplies at home. Rural communities comprise 83% of the global population without access to improved drinking water source and 71 per cent of those living without sanitation.
The report titled Progress on sanitation and drinking-water 2013 update is available here in english.
Resources
UNICEF Report: Children in an Urban World
This Report, produced by UNICEF, reviews and analyses key trends in the Urbanization of Developing Countries in the context of children’s accessibility to basic rights and services. There are helpful graphs that clearly display statistics and findings, such as; ‘Urban populations are growing fastest in Asian and Africa’, ‘Urbanization trends over time’ and ‘Education Demographics’.
There are hundreds of millions of children today live in urban slums, many without access to basic services. They are vulnerable to dangers ranging from violence and exploitation to the injuries, illnesses and death that result from living in crowded settlements atop hazardous rubbish dumps or alongside railroad tracks. There is a major problem with these children’s situations and needs being ignored and underrepresented by aggregate figures that show urban children to be better off that their rural counterparts, obscuring the disparities that exist among the children of the cities.
By 2050, over two thirds of the global population will be living in an urbanized area; this Report thus focuses on the key issues, such as health, housing and education, that must be remedied in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and prepare for a Sustainable Future.
Related UN Resources:
- UNICEF: Information by Country and Programme
- Children and the Millennium Development Goals
- Report- Progress for Children: A Report Card for Adolescents
- Pneumonia and Diarrhoea: Tackling the Deadliest Diseases for the World’s Poorest Children
- Inequities in Early Children Development: What the Data Say
Progress for Children new UNICEF report
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) just published Progress for Children: A report card on adolescents. The report has been released in conjunction with a four-part series on adolescent health by the British medical journal The Lancet.
The UNICEF report shows that although adolescents have made progress since 1990 – with increasing primary education enrolment and decreasing child mortality rates – those gains are not shared in all regions of the world.
The report is available in English.
Resources
- Progress for Children interactive website.
The State of the World’s Children 2012: Children in an Urban World
The State of the World’s Children 2012: Children in an Urban World was launched on 28 February 2012. More than half of the world’s 7 billion people now live in urban areas. Cities are known to generate economic growth – but, as the report reveals, not all children are benefiting from urban expansion. In this increasingly urban world, the absence of a sustained focus on child rights means that some children are being left behind
Resources
- Download full report
- Download statistical tables
- Previous editions
Progress on drinking water and sanitation 2012
MDG drinking-water target was met in 2010, five years ahead of schedule!
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports every two years on progress towards the drinking-water and sanitation target under Millennium Development Goal 7.
Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation reveals that, at the end of 2010, 89 per cent of the world’s population used improved drinking water sources, meeting the target. By 2015, an estimated 92 per cent of the global population will have access to improved drinking water.
However, serious challenge remain. The report also indicates that the world is far from meeting the MDG target for sanitation – and is unlikely to do so by 2015.
Documents:
Online course for justice professionals dealing with child victims
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and United Nations Office for Drug and Crime (UNODC) have launched an online training portal for justice professionals who deal with cases involving child victims and child witnesses of crime.
The training portal, the first of its kind, will target geographically diverse criminal justice professionals, including law enforcement officers, prosecutors, judges, social workers, health sector workers, lawyers and informal justice providers. Read more about the portal on the website.
Other resources:
Levels & Trends in Child Mortality 2011
The number of young children who die each day has plunged over the past two decades, new United Nations figures show, but the world is still lagging far behind in efforts to achieve its target for reducing child mortality.
The latest estimates, issued by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN World Health Organization (WHO), indicate that the number of children under the age of five who perish each year fell from more than 12 million in 1990 to about 7.6 million last year.
Other UN Resources
