Fig 1.
Sanitation indicator definitions used under the MDGs modified from: [24].
Table 1.
Countries and population included in this analysis, with exclusion reasons.
Fig 2.
Decision tree used in gap-filling country-level data and country exclusion methodology.
Table 2.
Countries included in this analysis and the water “clusters” identified by Onda and colleagues [26].
Countries in italics were filled based on cluster averages calculated by non-italicized countries.
Table 3.
Summary of countries affected by gap-filling.
Fig 3.
Illustration of the possible improvements in sanitation service level among the four categories reported by JMP and how they are incorporated into the MDG binary metric.
(a) Using the binary metric applied during the MDGs, only progress moving population to the top of the ladder (“Improved”) received credit toward the target, (b) types of progress that did not receive credit on the MDG target include moving a family from open defecation to shared use of an improved sanitation facility. Major improvements such as households upgrading from OD to a shared latrine were not counted under the MDGs; all changes shown in a and b receive credit when using the Ladder Score.
Table 4.
Ladder rungs and their multipliers.
Fig 4.
Overall global Ladder Score (left) and MDG % Improved (right) for 1990 and 2015.
Fig 5.
Progress from 1990–2015 across the MDG and ladder score among all 190 countries in our analysis using the categorical definitions of progress established by JMP.
(a) 138 countries that were in the same progress category are divided by the diagonal line indicating whether the country closed a larger percentage of the gap on the Ladder or MDG metric, and (b) global map illustrating country-level categorical progress on the Ladder Score vs. MDGs. An additional six countries closed 100% of the sanitation gap; they thus fall directly on the line in the “Met Goal” category and are not included in the figure. The countries with different categorical progress across the MDG and Ladder Score metrics are also listed in Table 5. Some wealthy countries with very high 1990 and 2015 coverage (e.g., USA, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden) showed slightly less progress on the ladder, either due to a slightly higher 1990 baseline ladder score than 1990 MDG score or because of a slight increase in the modeled % Shared. The base layer of the map is from naturalearthdata.com.
Table 5.
Countries that made greater categorical progress on the ladder score than on the MDG binary metric.
Fig 6.
Total (top), Urban (middle) and Rural (bottom) sanitation ladder coverage in Cambodia for 1990 (left side) and 2015 (right side), with Ladder Score for each condition above the pie chart.
Fig 7.
Total (top), Urban (middle) and Rural (bottom) sanitation ladder coverage in Lao PDR for 1990 (left side) and 2015 (right side), with Ladder Score for each condition above the pie chart.
Fig 8.
Total (top), Urban (middle) and Rural (bottom) sanitation ladder coverage in Ethiopia for 1990 (left side) and 2015 (right side), with Ladder Score for each condition above the pie chart.
Fig 9.
Total (top), Urban (middle) and Rural (bottom) sanitation ladder coverage in Nepal for 1990 (left side) and 2015 (right side), with Ladder Score for each condition above the pie chart.
Fig 10.
Total (top), Urban (middle) and Rural (bottom) sanitation ladder coverage in Ghana for 1990 (left side) and 2015 (right side), with Ladder Score for each condition above the pie chart.
Fig 11.
Total (top), Urban (middle) and Rural (bottom) sanitation ladder coverage in Poland for 1990 (left side) and 2015 (right side), with Ladder Score for each condition above the pie chart.