2023-11-22 12:06:07
Photo credit, WaterAid / Fabeha Monir
Communities across Bangladesh are working to change sanitation practices to improve health and fight disease.
- Author, Jovana Georgievski
- Role, BBC World Service
According to the United Nations, almost half of the world’s population is at risk of dying from diseases caused by the lack of safe toilets. Poor sanitation poses a high risk of contamination of drinking water with waste, which can lead to cholera and other deadly diseases.
While some countries, such as India, have managed to improve their sanitation records, there are signs that climate change is posing new challenges to providing safe toilets.
November 19 is World Toilet Day, established by the United Nations and celebrated since 2013 to highlight the global sanitation crisis.
Unicef estimates for 2023 show that around 400,000 children under the age of five continue to die each year from entirely preventable diseases caused by poor drinking water, sanitation and hygiene, or around 1,000 per day.
Lack of basic toilet facilities increases the risk of sexual assault and leads to menstrual shame. As a result, almost half of young African girls drop out of school before completing their education.
“It’s not a very sexy issue, and progress requires breaking the stigma around sanitation and recognizing that it is an absolutely fundamental public service that we all depend on for our daily health” , Kate Medlicott, sanitation and waste specialist at the World Health Organization (WHO), told the BBC.
Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania are the regions facing the greatest sanitation challenges, according to the United Nations.
Open defecation
The number of people practicing open defecation worldwide has fallen by more than two-thirds over the past two decades. But for around 419 million people worldwide, according to a report from the WHO and UNICEF, it is still the only possible option.
In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, 46 million people, or 23% of the population, practice open defecation, one of the highest rates in the world.
Kolawole Banwo, head of programs at WaterAid Nigeria, an international NGO, told the BBC: “Because the figures are so bleak, ending open defecation in Nigeria has become a matter of national dignity.”
With around 95 million Nigerians lacking access to basic sanitation services, the country faces cholera outbreaks. In many other countries, its water-related spread has been eliminated through water and wastewater treatment systems.
During the last cholera outbreak in January 2023, nearly 400 people died in the northeastern state of Borno.
Photo credit, WaterAid / Successor Barde
Amina Sarki, a 98-year-old woman living in northern Nigeria, had a toilet built in her backyard as part of the project to end open defecation.
Nigeria has set a goal of ending open defecation by 2025. According to Unicef, about 3.9 million toilets need to be built to achieve this goal on time.
In October 2022, the northern state of Jigawa became Nigeria’s first open defecation-free state.
A change for the better
While international agencies talk of a sanitation crisis, they also report that access to toilets around the world is improving – since 2000, 2.5 billion people have had access to a managed sanitation system safely.
Today, Nigeria has the highest number of people defecating in the open. Less than ten years ago, it was India, whose government managed to reverse the trend.
In 2014, India alone accounted for 90% of South Asia’s population and half of the world’s 1.2 billion people who defecated in the open.
At the time, about a fifth of Indian schools did not have girls’ toilets.
A vast toilet construction campaign was launched, considered the largest in the world. It resulted in the construction of approximately 110 million toilets for 600 million people over a period of 60 months.
Although the Indian government declared “an end to open defecation in rural areas” in 2019, UNICEF has extended the goal of eradicating the practice and says there is still work to be done. to do.
Health crisis
Ending open defecation is just one of the first steps. In Bangladesh, which declared an end to open defecation in 2015, less than half of the country’s 169 million people have access to a safely managed sanitation system.
Photo credit, Getty Images
Since 2000, nearly 2.5 billion people have had access to toilets.
“Open defecation is minimal – less than one percent – but we are still lagging behind when it comes to safely managed sanitation,” Hasin Jahan, country director of WaterAid Bangladesh, told the BBC.
As part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the country has promised to ensure access to adequate sanitation and hygiene for all by 2030, but these efforts must go hand in hand with the eradication of poverty.
In Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka alone, 4.4 million people, or about a fifth of the city’s population, live in slums.
“There are still families who share latrines, which is considered unsafe, and they cannot build individual toilets due to space constraints,” says Jahan.
Solution
Why is the search for solutions becoming more and more complicated?
Photo credit, Getty Images
Contaminated water kills 400,000 children every year
Toilets without sewers
Sewerless systems allow waste to be treated safely. Alternative solutions include high-tech loos that treat waste and can operate without a connection to the sewer network, or toilets powered by solar energy.
Photo credit, Getty Images
An employee of the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets demonstrates a toilet that incinerates waste at the press of a button, at the museum in New Delhi.
Unlike traditional piped sanitation systems, the sewerless approach requires little or no water supply.
According to a new UNICEF report, one in three children (739 million worldwide) already live in areas exposed to severe or very severe water scarcity, and climate change threatens to make the situation worse.
For now, waterless toilets may be an expensive solution for areas of the world affected by water shortages. But experts say that as climate events become more extreme and more frequent, the development of this technology will be prioritized, because climate change will affect poor and rich countries alike.
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