One in Three People Lack Access to Proper Sanitation

Sanitation is by no means a small talk topic: what happens in the bathroom is meant to stay there. Regarding this worldwide taboo, it seems at first slightly surprising that there is such a date as the World Toilet Day which is officially celebrated by the United Nations on November 19th each year. However, it is exactly this taboo that the UN attempting to tackle here - the consequences of this silence are severe. More than 340,000 children under five died from diarrheal diseases due to poor sanitation in 2013. And women and girls are especially vulnerable when it comes to lack of improved sanitation facilities.

Together with Mashable, Statista had a look at how access to sanitation improved within the last ten years and where more progress is needed. While Eastern Asia shows significant improvement, the situation in Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa is different. Here, the improvements were outpaced by population growth. In sub Saharan Africa, the population almost doubled since 1990 while in Eastern Asia, it increased by a fifth. It is also due to these numbers that despite (moderate) efforts on sanitation being made, almost as many people (even more in Sub Saharan Africa) lack access to proper sanitation as ten years ago.