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DEVELOPMENT: South Asia Exports Sanitation Successes

Nergui Manalsuren

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 4 2008 (IPS) - Practical solutions to the global sanitation crisis will require greater knowledge-sharing among developing nations, and also even more support for those efforts by multilateral institutions like the World Bank and United Nations, experts say.

Some 1.5 million children die every year due to inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene, while more than a third of the world&#39s population has no access to basic toilet facilities.

Governments and development agencies are working to cut these numbers at least in half by 2015 as part of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. According to the children&#39s agency UNICEF, the situation is most serious in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Western Asia, Eurasia and Oceania, none of which are on track for meeting the sanitation target.

However, UNICEF notes that "a number of regions have made tremendous gains. Eastern Asia&#39s coverage, for example, has almost doubled since 1990. Similarly, South Asia managed to move from 20 percent to 37 percent coverage, although it started with the lowest baseline of any region."

Speaking at the United Nations recently, Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, chair of the U.N. secretary-general&#39s advisory board on water and sanitation, quoted Mahatma Gandhi, who once wrote: "The cause of many of our diseases is the condition of our lavatories and our bad habit of disposing of excreta anywhere and everywhere." Gandhi had no hesitation saying that in his view, sanitation was more important than independence.

India is now on track to meet the sanitation goal ahead of schedule, having increased coverage from one percent in 1981 to 48 percent in 2007.

Much credit for this is owed to the work of the Sulabh International Social Service Organisation, which promotes sustainable, affordable sanitation and hygiene throughout India.

"This organisation has proved how effective small-scale solutions can be and how they can be extended all over India within a short time span," Willem-Alexander said. "Thousands of pay-and-use public toilet-cum-bath complexes and more than a million pour-flush latrines in private houses have been built, and are maintained, and they are used by more than ten million people every day."

"By doing so, Sulabh has restored human dignity and a new future to thousands of &#39untouchables&#39," he added.

The Sulabh sanitation strategy has since been expanded to other developing countries like Afghanistan.

According to the Millennium Project Task Force on Water and Sanitation, over the past couple of decades, several countries in the developing world have made significant progress in substantially increasing access to water and sanitation services.

As a result, there are now numerous globally relevant examples of success that provide guidance for reaching the water and sanitation targets.

Roberto Lenton, co-coordinator of the U.N. Millennium Project Task Force on Water and Sanitation, said that although some countries in the developing world have made progress in increasing access to water and sanitation services, it doesn&#39t come naturally for countries to share their experiences without some systematic way of making that happen.

"I think that there are some good examples where the experience of one developing country has been picked up by another, but usually there&#39s an intermediary – it tends to be international NGOs or international programmes connected through World Bank or the U.N.," said Lenton.

In Bangladesh, the Community-Led Total Sanitation programme is widely viewed as an effective model that can be replicated in rural places where open defecation is a norm, and one which is controlled by local communities, who decide where to dig the holes and construct homemade pit latrines.

It has since been used in Indonesia, Cambodia, Mongolia, Nepal, Uganda and Zambia, where it has had a major positive impact on the incidence of diarrhoeal and other diseases.

"Bangladesh&#39s example is a really good one. The process of expanding beyond Bangladesh was the result of two organisations that had a principle role. Water Aid is one of them, the largest NGO working in water and sanitation, they do have many programmes in different countries, and they&#39re involved in the Bangladesh example. Also, the NGO Village Education Resource Centre," he told IPS.

"The south-south cooperation really did occur through intermediary," Lenton added. "It wasn&#39t as though Bangladesh directly linked up with Cambodia, or with other countries," Lenton said. "But the idea definitely came from Bangladesh, then the Water and Sanitation Programme of the World Bank has been supporting and promoting CLTC in South and Southeast Asia."

Lenton believes that many of the most innovative and appropriate models are emerging from developing countries, but they often lack coherent support from donors or development agencies.

"So you get good ideas coming out of Bangladesh, for example, but they come out maybe accidentally, so how can one really develop more to accelerate it? How do you promote innovation, and how do you promote dissemination to other countries?" he said.

There is an ongoing debate within the water and sanitation community about whether the prevailing Western model of water-based flush toilets should be applied in the context of developing countries, with some advocating for systems that convert human waste into low-cost fertiliser.

Lenton believes the most important thing is that "communities should choose what the best system that they want is, and you should not impose any particular technology."