Can Microfinance Bring Drinking Water and Sanitation to Third-World Countries?

Microfinance Can Help Lessen the Water and Sanitation Crisis Microfinancing offers a potential strategy that could significantly assist in beating this challenge and meeting the UN's water and sanitation Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Microfinance is an infrastructure that provides manageable credit, saving opportunities and other key financial services for under-served populations, and it has achieved a good track record in densely populated rural areas, cities and small towns. It helps jump-start local economy by providing responsible business loans to entrepreneurial individuals who wish to start a small business, thus enabling them to improve their financial situation and provide work for others. It helps people save for education, health, etc., and generally encourages people to gain financial perspective and take control of their money.

How Is All This Connected to Water? It's simple: many residents of these impoverished areas lack water and sanitation services because they cannot afford the hook-up fees or the costs of extending water and sewer lines from nearby locations. By improving private economy, microfinancing can help people pay for domestic water provision and sanitation services. Of course, this is not an all encompassing solution - microfinancing isn't available in all third-world countries, and this problem has to be approached simultaneously from several direction. It isn't an easy solution either -, microfinancing requires infrastructure and collaboration between the state, the banks and private lenders, let alone education. But it is effective, and it can help significantly.