Sanitation investments in poor countries yield huge benefits in productivity and health

Bummed by your portfolio? Looking for a sure-fire place to put your money? Your search is over, if you invest in sanitation. From Terra Daily: Experts estimate that $9 in productivity, health and other benefits are returned for every dollar invested installing toilets for people in countries that today are off-track in meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for sanitation.

Some argue that meeting the sanitation MDG is also a prerequisite to the goals of reducing global poverty.

Achieving the sanitation goal - to simply halve the number of people without access to a toilet by 2015 - would cost $38 billion, less than 1% of annual world military spending. That investment, however, would yield $347 billion worth of benefits - much of it related to higher productivity and improved health....

Decorative toilet seat, "Bartux," Wikimedia Commons