People queue to collect water from a natural spring at Camp Luka, a slum outside Kinshasa, the capital. Children carry up to 10 litres of water and adults up to 30 litres, climbing slippery, mud-covered paths between the spring and the residential area. Many of them collect water three or more times per day.

In May 2008 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 70 percent of the population continues to live without adequate sanitation facilities. Cholera epidemics sicken 20,000 people each year, and diarrhoea-related illnesses cause 14 per cent of the countrys under-five mortalities. The UNICEF-supported Village Assaini (Healthy Villages) and Ecole Assainie (Healthy School) programmes encourage the protection of safe water in nearly 800 villages and the provision of gender-separated toilets, hand-washing stations and hygiene education in over 300 schools. Still, only a fraction of those villages and schools have been certified as healthy. 2008 is the International Year of Sanitation, which heralds global efforts to improve access to basic sanitation. An estimated 2.6 billion people around the world live without basic sanitation, 980 million of them children. Poor sanitation, poor hygiene and unsafe water kill 1.5 million children under five each year, in part because social stigma prevents the discussion of proper excreta disposal.