West Africa is yet again at the bottom of this year's United Nations' human development index, in part because so many of the region's countries lack access to water and sanitation.

"This is a crisis that is holding back human progress, consigning large segments of humanity to lives of poverty, vulnerability and insecurity," according to the 2006 human development report titled 'Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis'.

"The crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns," it said.

The report found that water access problems in sub-Saharan Africa slash five percent off Gross Domestic Product (GDP) annually, "far more than the region receives in aid." It added that about half the girls in Sub-Saharan Africa who drop out of school do so because of poor water and sanitation facilities.

An estimated 1.8 million children around the world die from diarrhoea that could be prevented with access to clean water and a toilet, while almost 50 percent of all people in developing countries suffer from related health problems.

The worst off country in Africa is oil-rich Equatorial Guinea where 57 percent of the population do not have access to clean water, despite the country achieving around 16 percent GDP growth this year, according to the IMF. It is followed by Niger; then Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso.

All those countries are at the bottom of the report's overall Human Development Index (HDI), which also measures education, life expectancy, GDP and other indicators.

For Niger -- which is at the absolute bottom of the HDI list, where 54 percent of the population do not have access to water -- the problem has become an emergency, according to the country director of Oxfam Charles Mampusu.

"People are so desperate for water that after rains many go out and collect water that is stagnant," he said, adding that lack of rain is also at the center of the country's food security and malnutrition problems.

"It only rains a maximum for three month and every year the millet [Niger's staple] soon starts running out," Mampusu said.

The report said that the problem is solvable as there is enough water in the world to meet human needs for consumption, agriculture and industry. "These shortages and environmental stresses do not reflect absolute scarcity - but almost always come about through poor policy decisions," the report said.

To resolve the problem it called on leaders of the G8 to take the lead in a new global action plan "to focus fragmented international efforts to mobilize resources and galvanize political action by putting water and sanitation front and centre on the development agenda."

The estimated cost of US $10 billion is "just five days" worth of global military spending and less than half what rich countries spend each year on mineral water," the report noted.

Lead author of the report Kevin Watkins said, "When it comes to water and sanitation, the world suffers from a surplus of conference activity and a deficit of credible action. Either we take concerted action now to bring clean water and sanitation to the world's poor, or we consign millions of people to lives of avoidable poverty, poor health and diminished opportunities."

"We have a collective responsibility to succeed," Watkins said.