Water & Sanitation
The highest priority for UN-Habitat’s Water and Sanitation programme is improving access to safe water and helping provide adequate sanitation to millions of low-income urban dwellers and measuring that impact. World leaders meeting at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 committed themselves to attaining the Millennium Development Goal 7, target 10 which aims to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015. In 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg added another target: to halve by 2015, the proportion of people who do not have access to basic sanitation.
The main aim of the UN-Habitat Water and Sanitation Programme is to contribute to the achievement of the internationally agreed goals related to water and sanitation in human settlements with particular focus on the urban poor, in order to facilitate equitable social, economic and environmental development.