Unclean water, a global threat

Tomorrow is World Water Day. The theme of this year is "sanitation matters", which coincides with the International Year of Sanitation, calling for a global action plan to resolve a growing crisis that is affecting more than one out of three people on the planet.

It also challenges us to accelerate the progress toward the attainment of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG), envisioning halving the proportion of people living without access to basic sanitation by the year 2015 - but we are nowhere near on pace to achieve that goal.

Experts predict that by 2015, 2.1 billion people will still lack basic sanitation. At the present rate, sub-Saharan Africa will not reach the target until 2076.