Advancing Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene

Residents fill up at a harvesting structure, which has made water readily available for drinking, agriculture and sanitation during the dry season.

Jal Bhagirathi Foundation

The health, economic and social consequences of limited access to clean water and improved sanitation services are enormous.  Nearly 800 million people lack improved access to water and about 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation.  Furthermore, specific regions, chiefly sub-Saharan Africa and many rural areas lag significantly behind other parts of the world in terms of access to sanitation.

USAID’s investments in water supply and sanitation respond to the urgent need to safeguard water resources for the well-being of both people and the environment.  

To realize these goals, USAID is pursuing a multi-pronged approach in water and sanitation, including:

• Improving health and nutrition
• Building capacity of small-scale service providers
• Strengthening water and sanitation utilities
• Mobilizing domestic capital for infrastructure development
• Improving household and community-level hygiene and sanitation
• Exploiting synergies between disaster relief efforts and water and sanitation projects

The Agency has responded aggressively to these challenges, making water supply and sanitation projects the highest funded category of water-related activities.  USAID customizes its interventions based on urban, peri-urban, and rural contexts.  We also promote knowledge exchange among developing countries to support global best practices.    

The results of our work include:

• More than 2.8 million people provided with improved access to drinking water supply and nearly 2.9 million with improved access to sanitation facilities in fiscal year 2010.
• At the end of 2011, Senegal began implementing the second phase of the Water and Development Alliance (WADA), which will target 32,400 people through the construction of 100 water points (such as wells or boreholes), 425 family latrines, three blocks of school latrines in each region, and the repair of 2,500 latrines.

USAID’s WASHplus project, presently working in six countries in Africa and South Asia, aims to promote improvement of three key hygiene practices for diarrheal disease reduction that we take for granted in the United States: hand washing with soap; household water treatment and safe storage; and safe feces disposal.