The Need for a Sanitation Revolution in LAC: Conclusions from World Water Week

Sustainable Development Goal #6 (SDG6) set ambitious sanitation and wastewater treatment targets. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) countries have committed to achieving them by 2030. Conventional, business-as-usual approaches will not achieve SDG6. The region must go through a sanitation revolution that will require not only creative and innovative ideas, but an overall revolution in thinking within the sector. It will also require the collaboration of all public and private stakeholders. This paper makes a case for that revolution, and how to best make it happen. As part of World Water Week 2017 (WWW), the IDB organized, in coordination with several partners, a set of four sessions (referred to as “Eye on LAC”) highlighting the challenges accompanying SDG6 targets for the region. This paper summarizes the discussions, findings and conclusions reached from those WWW sessions, and provides recommendations on strategies that will help LAC launch the sanitation revolution it needs, in order to meet SDG6 Targets 6.2 and 6.3 by 2030.