Coauthor, Nicolas Dickinson, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre

$25 Can't Give Someone Clean Water for Life: The Real Cost of Sustainable Service

Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) development organizations are often asked by donors to quantify their projects in terms of unit cost or cost per beneficiary....

By Katie Scolari-Borden and John Sauer, Water For People

At the Aspen Environment Forum 2011 (May 30-June 2) discussions focused on the implications of reaching the 7 billion global population mark, which should occur by Halloween. This will have serious implications for...

© Ryan Rayburn/World Bank

After two successful years bringing major players (including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) in the water and sanitation sector together for World Water Day, it's a good time to think about taking those collaborative efforts outside the glass atriums...

Nathan Strauss, 17, a student at Abington Senior High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is part of a growing movement of America's youth who are stepping up to make a change in the lives of the students around the world who are carrying water and not books.

This week thousands of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) experts and hundreds of members of the media came together in Stockholm for World Water Week to discuss solutions for the world WASH challenge. David Trouba of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council suggested that "solving the sanitation...

Last month the UN General Assembly declared access to water and sanitation a human right.

This might seem strange if you live in the US as you are accustomed to having instantaneous access to safe drinking...

I've been traveling the past three weeks in Bangladesh and West Bengal visiting water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) organizations and their field programs. I've covered a fair amount of ground and have seen the work of local governments, the UN and international and local NGOs.

Five to ten years...

On Wednesday, April 21, the World Health Organization (WHO) released their annual report on sanitation and drinking water. The assessment: sanitation and water must no longer play second fiddle to other priorities.

Why?

"Unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and the lack of hygiene claim the lives of an estimated 2.2 million...

On World Water Day (March 22) a coalition of nearly 30 organizations from the public and private sectors, including foundations and faith leaders, came together at "Uniting for Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation," an event at the National Geographic Society in Washington D.C. to spur stronger commitments to...

By the looks of it, a new cause has been born: bringing access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene to those on the planet who still lack it.

In the past few weeks Cirque du Soleil’s founder flew to outer space; superstars, led by Jessica Biel, pledged...

It's mind boggling. We have a cure to solve life-threatening global public health problems, yet we fail to apply it consistently. The cure, dubbed the most important medical advance of the 20th century by readers of the British Medial Journal, is basic sanitation, good hygiene and access to safe...

Since the G8 met last year in Hokkaido, over 1.4 million children have died from diarrhea due to lack of safe drinking water and toilets. Today the leaders failed again to take steps to address this solvable global public health crisis and...

Co-authored with Katryn Bowe

More than 90,000 Americans have signed an unprecedented petition to the Senate in support of global access to clean water and sanitation. The petition calls for more Senators to join Sen. Durbin and Sen. Corker to sponsor the Senator Paul Simon Water for the...

Two new reports out this week by WaterAid and PATH remind us what we have shamefully forgotten: diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide. This is a wake-up call because even those of us in the international development field have pretty much neglected the fact that diarrhea is...

There is a photograph that travelers inevitably take when they go to a developing country -- a picture of a woman carrying a large container of water on her head. The woman's posture is ramrod straight, the envy of runway models everywhere, and her face rarely betrays the amount of...

A few days ago at a DC-style networking session for public health folks, I introduced myself as the Communications Director for Water Advocates.

I am used to receiving surprised -- even shocked -- expressions when people learn that poor sanitation and unsafe water cause the illnesses that fill half...

Public indifference to the HIV/AIDS epidemic was chronicled in 1987 in And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. As the author Randy Shilts lamented, "Everyone responded with an ordinary pace to an extraordinary situation." Thankfully now there is attention to this deadly disease, but it wasn't...

Last week a mix of water and sanitation experts gathered for World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden to mull over the world's biggest public health crisis. The problem is that not enough people paid attention.

Each year over 2 million deaths could be prevented with improvements related to...

Each day in developing countries more children die unnecessarily from water-related diseases than there are people in my hometown on Long Island, NY. Around 4,000 children per day or 1.5 million per year die from an age-old form of water torture known as diarrhea.

Sometimes I imagine this: the entire...

Diseases associated with water and sanitation continue to cause thousands of preventable deaths each day. About 135,000 children die each month, a disaster by anyone's standards. It is an interesting phenomenon that society pays attention to a natural disaster -- like an earthquake or a tsunami -- far differently than...