The Sanitation Shortfall Of Europe S Small Communities

摘要

An European Union (EU) in which 20 million or more people remain without safe sanitation in these early months of 2009 must sound an unlikely proposition, but there is evidence of it being an alarming reality. It is a situation brought about by the EU's two most recent rounds of expansion, the last in January 2007, to take in states of central and eastern Europe. Stretching from the Baltic states in the north to Bulgaria in the south, these countries commonly suffer from the lack of investment in water supply and sanitation infrastructure that characterised several decades of Communist rule. They also have in common much larger rural populations than is typical of the western European countries. In a report published as a contribution to the 2008 InternationalYear of Sanitation~*, the Global Water Partnership (GWP) for Eastern and Central Europe records this as varying between 25% of the national population in the Czech Republic and over 50% in Slovenia.