Financing the water and sanitation goals: The role of aid

The Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA) has drawn on research from a number of sources to estimate the amount of aid needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (including the sanitation goal). These costs appear in Table 1 and include an estimate of Australia's fair share of total aid required to meet the goals based on our proportion of OECD income. The calculation of the water and sanitation costings is probably the most difficult of the goals to estimate due to uncertainty about the proportion of the cost that can and should be borne by private investment, the types of services provided and the degree of efficiency gain that can be extracted from existing allocations.