Sustainable development means working together to meet people’s basic needs—the things they need to survive, such as food, clean water and a place to live—in ways that will continue to work in the long term and will protect the environment.

Clean water is a key part of sustainable development. Not having access to drinkable water means millions of children, usually girls, have to walk hours each day just to get water, and often it is still not clean. This costs them time that they could otherwise spend at school. Dirty water often leads to sickness and death.

Clean water everywhere?

Percentage of rural population with access to clean water
Sierra Leone	Ghana	United States	Canada
46%	67%	100%	100%

Not everyone has access to clean water. This table shows the percentage of people living in rural areas of specific countries that have access to clean water.

Clean sanitation (like toilets) is another part of sustainable development. If sanitation systems are unclean, diseases spread and people are more likely to fall ill and die.

Fact File

About one in 10 school-age African girls drop out of school once they reach puberty because they don’t have clean or private washrooms to use at school.

Having a sustainable place to live—one that provides water, health care, education and proper sanitation—is essential to living sustainably. In Sierra Leone, a lot of people live in slums in the capital city of Freetown. This is because the war displaced a lot of people, and 80 percent of displaced people moved to the city. Once there, the only place many of them could afford to live was in the slums.

In Sierra Leone, a lot of people live in slums in the capital city of Freetown.

Slums are not sustainable for many reasons. In most slums, there is no access to clean water or sanitary toilets. Children have little to no chance of going to school and diseases spread quickly and easily because so many people are living in such cramped quarters.

Given the combined issues of poverty, education, health and sustainable development, West Africa needs support in order to improve the lives of children and to reach the targets set out by the Millennium Development Goals.