Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Health Equity for Sustainable Development in Bangladesh
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Abstract
Water and sanitation, hygiene (WASH) are essential for health equity and sustainable development, yet Bangladesh continuously faces critical challenges related to preventable health risks. As it is important that we achieve a clear understanding of the improvements in safely managed drinking water and sanitation. These are associated with better population health and identify remaining equity challenges. The study was implemented by using a secondary data set collected from World Development Indicators (WDI) and Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). The data contained indicators for Bangladesh from 1995 to 2024 including variables like safe drinking water and sanitation, life expectancy, mortality rate, poverty percentage, Gini index and urban-rural population. Microsoft Excel was used for descriptive and correlation analysis to analyze the factors and trend analysis for observing the balance between life expectancy and mortality. The sampled data showed that access to safe sanitation reached 37.3% over 3 times in 2000 but access to safe water is below 60% in 2022. The imbalanced proportion in rural-urban equity can be seen as 67.32% remaining in rural while 32.68% remains in urban. This is not a low percentage. It indicates a serious urban-equity challenge. Extreme poverty rate has decreased from 43.4% to 5.9% while Gini index has fallen from 33.4 to 30.9 including life expectancy increased to 75 years. The child mortality rate has decreased from 115.5 to 30.5. The analysis of the 1995–2024 shows that Bangladesh has made improvements in the field of health and sanitation. Improvements in water, sanitation and hygiene have led to an increase in the life expectancy of Bangladeshis and a decrease in mortality rates. These services have not been provided equally between urban and rural areas. As a result, urban slums remain a major obstacle to sustainable development. This study found that the descriptive and trends provide success in health and poverty reduction. It highlights that structural inequities and weak governance remain barriers to fully sustainable development.
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Publication Details
- Type of Publication:
- Conference Name: National Interdisciplinary Conference on Sustainable Development Goals-2026 (NICSDG-2026)
- Date of Conference: 16/07/2026 - 16/07/2026
- Venue: Metropolitan University, Bateshwar, Sylhet-3104, Bangladesh
- Organizer: Metropolitan University