East African Business Week

On the current trajectory, it will take over two centuries for Sub-Saharan Africa to meet its sanitation MDG target.  What is more, only 20 countries in the region are on track to meet the water MDG target by 2015.  
All of this has massive consequences for child mortality in Africa. A new report released by the international charity WaterAid shows that there are more people in the world today lacking adequate sanitation services than in 1990.  Unless urgent action is taken, nearly all governments in Sub-Saharan African will fail to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) pledge they made to halve the proportion of people without sanitation by 2015.
Released a day before World Toilet Day, the report states that to get the sanitation and water MDGs back on track, countries in sub-Saharan Africa need to spend at least 3.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) on these services.  The report also calls on donor countries to double global aid flows to water, sanitation and hygiene by prioritising an additional US$10 billion per year.
The report also identifies that it is Africa's poorest people who are being left behind; poor people in Africa are five times less likely to have access to adequate sanitation and over 15 times more likely to practise open defecation than Africa's rich.  According to WaterAid, governments should tackle this inequity through better targeting of water and sanitation resources and services to the poor.
The WaterAid report highlights that the shortfall in water and sanitation services costs Sub-Saharan African countries around 5% of GDP each year ($47.7 b in 2009), more than is provided in development aid to the entire continent ($47.6 billion in 2009).