Asian Development Bank (ADB) chief Haruhiko Kuroda has urged regional governments and the private sector to do more to help the 1.8 billion people in Asia who lack access to adequate sanitation, the bank said on Tuesday.

The issue of sanitation "poses enormous challenges to Asia's environment and public health," the Manila-based bank said in a press release, quoting Kuroda who made the statement at a Sanitation Dialogue held in Manila.

The Dialogue brought together a wide range of municipal and national government officials from 17 countries in the Asia and Pacific region.

While urging governments to give a greater priority to the issue, Kuroda said that sanitation, like water supply, cannot be sustained on government budgets alone and that more needs to be done to attract private sector investment.

"Key to a change in strategy is the consideration of sanitation as a business," Kuroda said.

"The economic returns of good sanitation have been demonstrated universally and we must find clever ways of translating them into effective and sustainable solutions for Asia," he added.

ADB has committed 20 percent of its Water Financing Partnership Facility to sanitation, which will help provide 200 million people with sustainable access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation.

Kuroda cited successful national sanitation initiatives in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, and said ADB would continue to prioritize the issue.

"Our annual average lending pipeline for sanitation has increased from 300 million U.S. dollars from the period 2003-2007 to 710 million dollars for 2008-2010," said the ADB chief, adding that as a proportion of ADB's overall funding commitments, water and sanitation projects are expected to increase from an average of 8.5 percent in 2003-2007 to about 17 percent in 2008-2010.

(Xinhua News Agency March 3, 2009)