providing access is often perceived as the core function of water and sanitation services and therefore considered to be the area where most benefits materialise in addition access to those services can confer many additional benefits ranging from the easily identifiable and quantifiable such as time saved from collecting water closer to home or from defecating in a household latrine rather than in the open to the intangible and difficult to measure such as convenience and wellbeing the latter are collectively referred to as nonhealth benefits this is partly due to the fact that measuring the impact of water sanitation and hygiene interventions on health is difficult and highly locationspecific the world health organisation estimates that the total economic benefits stemming from achieving the sanitation mdg for the most offtrack countries would amount to usd billion out of which would be generated from time saved from not having to travel long distances and queue for obtaining water or defecating hutton and haller