The year will include major regional conferences on sanitation to share best practices and help accelerate progress, including those that focus on school sanitation. It will also help encourage public and private partnerships to help tap
into the comparative strengths of each sector, advocate and raise awareness on sanitation, gain additional funding and develop country-level plans of action.

Additionally, many activities and events were planned inside and outside the UN system surrounding Sanitation and Hygiene Week (15-21 March) and World Water Day (22 March). One such event was UN Water’s observance of World Water Day (this year to be celebrated as World Sanitation Day), which took place in Geneva on 14 March and was co-organized by UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council.

We tend to forget how similar sanitation difficulties were overcome in 19th century London.

In a recent article in The Guardian by economics editor Larry Elliott, he noted how Charles Dickens would have felt at home in the streets of today’s Dhaka.

As in Victorian times, the shanty towns of Bangladesh’s capital reek of excrement dropped from makeshift hanging toilets perched precariously on bamboo stilts a couple of meters above the mire.

However, as Elliott so rightly points out, sanitation is such a low priority that when the UN drew up its original list of Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015, what did not feature was the goal of ensuring that children of slum dwellers in Dhaka could go to the toilet without endangering their lives.

In the west we take clean water and sanitation for granted. Supplying septic tanks and u-bends to Third World countries has never had the emotional appeal of helping starving babies, HIV/Aids patients and children desperate to go to school.

Let us hope that this 2008 focus on sanitation makes some real advances on situations such as that in Dhaka – though there are cities and countries in equally bad shape the world over.