The sanitation and hygiene targets of the sustainable development goals: scope and challenges

The sanitation target of the Sustainable Development Goals is that everyone should have a ‘safely-managed’ sanitation facility by 2030 and that open defecation be eliminated. The scale of this target is unprecedently large: ∼5.6 billion additional people will require safely-managed sanitation by 2030 (∼1 million per day), and ∼1.3 billion people will need to switch from open to fixed-defecation in a sanitation facility by 2030 (240,000 per day). Safely-managed shared sanitation and container-based sanitation are both likely to be part of the solution, particularly in urban slums. The SDG hygiene target covers facilities for handwashing with soap, menstrual-hygiene management, and food hygiene, but only handwashing with soap is monitored by WHO/UNICEF. In 2015, the percentage of people with handwashing-with-soap facilities at home ranged from 15% in Sub-Saharan Africa to 76% in Western Asia and North Africa. The costs to meet these targets are around US$46 billion in urban areas, and US$25 billion in rural areas, per year during 2016–2030. Benefit-cost ratios are ∼18 in rural areas. There is a correspondingly considerable need for training local sanitation and hygiene professionals, so that they can plan and design interventions to meet the SDG target.