Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene Promotion

Excerpt

This chapter focuses on water supply, excreta disposal, and hygiene promotion and considers the costs and benefits of each in turn. Water supply and sanitation can be provided at various levels of service, and those levels have implications for benefits. Water supply and sanitation offer many benefits in addition to improved health, and those benefits are considered in detail because they have important implications for the share of the cost that is attributable to the health sector. From the point of view of their effect on burden of disease, the main health benefit of water supply, sanitation, and hygiene is a reduction in diarrheal disease, although the effects on other diseases are substantial. In the concluding sections, the percentage reductions arrived at in the discussion throughout the chapter are used together with data on existing levels of coverage to derive estimates of the potential effects of water supply and excreta disposal on the burden of disease, globally and by region, and with cost data to derive cost-effectiveness estimates.