Clean drinking water and sanitation are basic human rights. Lack of access to clean water and sanitation is a silent crisis that destroys livelihoods and claims more lives through illnesses than any war claims through guns.

The good news is that our combined efforts have made a difference. Between 1990 and 2010, more than 2 billion people around the world gained access to safe drinking water, which meant that we achieved that Millennium Development Goal five years ahead of schedule.

But we have an unfinished agenda. More than 600 million people will still lack safe drinking water even in 2015, the target year for MDG, with people in disadvantaged communities three to four times less likely to have access. More than 1.7 billion people in Asia and the Pacific are also without modern sanitation, which means we are totally off track on the MDG target of halving the number of people living under these conditions. And about 100 million people in South East Asia alone continue to defecate in the open.