Tomorrow is World Water Day. The theme of this year is "sanitation matters", which coincides with the International Year of Sanitation, calling for a global action plan to resolve a growing crisis that is affecting more than one out of three people on the planet.

It also challenges us to accelerate the progress toward the attainment of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG), envisioning halving the proportion of people living without access to basic sanitation by the year 2015 – but we are nowhere near on pace to achieve that goal.

Experts predict that by 2015, 2.1 billion people will still lack basic sanitation. At the present rate, sub-Saharan Africa will not reach the target until 2076.

Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of the abysmal sanitation conditions endured by about 2.6 billion people globally. That adds up to an unconscionable 1.5 million young lives cut short by a cause we know well how to prevent.

United Nations Development Program's Human Development Report 2006 has long claimed this issue as a global emergency: across much of the developing world, unclean water is an immeasurably greater threat to human security than violent conflict.

Yet, as the report points out, unlike wars and natural disasters, this global crisis does not galvanize concerted international action. Like hunger, it is a silent emergency experienced by the poor.

In China, it is estimated that more than 300 million rural residents still have low access to safe drinking water, facing problems of shortage as well as severe contamination. Pollution of water sources is an increasingly severe issue that is widespread.

The situation is not much better in schools in some rural regions, where water and sanitation facilities remain poor. Hygiene actually has certain multiplier effects that may not be evident at first glance.

In addition to roughly 660 major cities, China has about 18,000 towns. Many of them have limited financial resources for sanitation projects and limited urban planning capacity. Most place little emphasis on sanitation and have few sewerage systems and/or treatment facilities.