One of the Millennium Development Goals was to "to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation facilities by 2015.” Despite this, most water quality budgets in governments and aid organizations are allocated to water and water alone. Much less focus is paid to sanitation. Our focus is on toilets instead of water.

People with decent sanitation have fewer diseases and take fewer days off work and school. They save on medicines, and the state saves in sanitation and they don’t have to pay for funerals of their children dead from dysentery and cholera.

Every dollar invested in sanitation brings an average of $7 return in health costs averted and productivity gained.

Globally, if universal sanitation were achieved by 2015, it would cost $95 billion but save $660 billion.