As 2008 is the International Year of Sanitation (IYS), the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation (JMP) has taken the opportunity to make sanitation a major focus in its 2008 update report, entitled Progress in Drinking-water and Sanitation: special focus on sanitation.

This report details global progress towards the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) target for drinking-water and sanitation, and analyses what these trends suggest for the remainder of the UN Decade "Water for Life" (2005 - 2015).

It introduces a new way of assessing global, regional and country progress using the "ladder" concept for both sanitation and drinking-water. For sanitation, trends in using improved, shared, and unimproved sanitation facilities are shown, in addition to the trend in open defecation. The drinking-water ladder shows the percentage of global population using piped connections into a dwelling, plot or yard; other improved water sources; and unimproved sources. The intention is to continue refining the "ladders" in future reports.

This report aims at helping policy-makers, scientists and others who wish to build sector capacity at national and subnational levels. Please note that the figures found in the present MDG assessment report may differ from those found on this web site, since the web-site data are regularly updated.