In the year 2000, world leaders had a special meeting where they established a set of world goals in order to improve human poverty, hunger and other crucial problems like child mortality. The deadline set for these Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is 2015. In compliance with these goals, UNICEF in partnership with WHO (World Health Organization), have implemented a Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) report that is called “Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2010 Update Report”. Human sanitation is directly correlated to the importance of having clean quality water. Today, millions of people still live without access to safe drinking water also lacking a decent sanitation.

The first and perhaps most important Millennium Development Goal is the need to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. 27% of the world’s poverty and 36% of the hunger are causes directly related to access to quality water. (Source: http://www.unsgab.org/docs/mdgs/mdgs-ref02.pdf). All other millennium goals such as improving maternal health or reducing child mortality are all in great part directly related to the problem of water scarcity or water pollution issues.  If one third of the MDGs depend on water the WHO and UNICEF have come to the realization that in order to even have a minimum of hope to reach the stated goals if they come up with a parallel plan in order to take care of  the issue of water quality, scarcity and access.

The report presents the situation up to know in order to assess the present situation and the future steps to be taken in the future.  According to current statistics “2.6 billion people do not use improved sanitation which means that less than two thirds of the world population has access to clean-water facilities” (Source: http://www.unwater.org/downloads/JMP_report_2010.pdf). Nonetheless, a considerable effort and improvement has been obtained in Northern Africa, South-eastern Asia and Estern Asia, while the situation appears to be somewhat standing still. Yet, the areas needing more help are being taken care of considering that out of the 2.6 billion people, 72% of them live in Asia. While statistics seem quite positive, indeed 87% of the world population and 84% of individuals in developing countries are getting access to water through improved sources of drinking-water, there still remains about 884 million people in the rest of the world who fail to have access to clean water facilities. “Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for over a third of that number, and is lagging behind in progress towards the MDG target with only 60% of the population using improved sources of drinking-water” (Source: http://www.unwater.org/downloads/JMP_report_2010.pdf ). At this rate, the MDG targets will be missed my approximately 13 points unless humongous efforts are made to ameliorate the situation.  In addition, Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from great socioeconomic disparities that also impact on access to improved sanitation. The richest part of the population has somewhat of an improved access to drinking-water sources and to sanitation facilities. The poorest 20% of the population is “around 16 times more likely to practice open defecation than the richest quintile” (Source: http://www.unwater.org/downloads/JMP_report_2010.pdf).

Open air defecation is a serious problem that takes places in many reality of the world, causing the spread of disease and epidemics.  Since the urbanization of many countries like India or China an increasing number of people in urban zones defecate in the open. Yet, an improvement as been made since the report states that a decline in open defecation rates has occurred in all regions of the world.

In order to monitor a project of such humongous endeavor, local and national government need to work closely with the WHO and UNICEF in order to collaborate and facilitated the monitoring of the water standards at a global level. Over the past years, the Joint Monitoring Program has worked in close partnership with a variety of pilot countries in order to better understand how to adopt common water monitoring measures to better coordinate and harmonize research approaches in order to maximizes the authenticity of the results. This report is crucial in order to have a stabile starting base for the long-term development of the millennium goals, but also serves as a data report for the future work of NGOs and charities that are implementing strategies to reduce the water crisis around the world.