Via ReutersAlertNet: Lack of toilets, clean water costs world $260 bln a year - Liberian president. Excerpt:
Poor access to sanitation and clean water costs the global economy $260 billion each year, according to Liberia's president who is leading work to craft proposals for a new set of global anti-poverty goals.
They are intended replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were agreed in 2000 and expire in 2015.
“$260 billion in economic losses annually is directly linked to inadequate water supply and sanitation around the world,” Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf told a meeting on the post-2015 development agenda in the capital Monrovia this week. “We must take this issue more seriously.”
If governments meet the current MDG to halve the proportion of the population without sanitation by 2015, the lives of 400,000 children under the age of five would be saved worldwide, including more than 100,000 in Nigeria and 66,000 in India, according to charity WaterAid. In total, 2.5 million lives would be saved each year if everyone had access to safe water and sanitation, the charity says.
“All too often, access to adequate sanitation in particular is seen as an outcome of development, rather than a driver of economic development and poverty reduction,” said Johnson Sirleaf, one of three co-chairs of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s high-level panel on the post-2015 development agenda.
