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DEVELOPMENT: Sanitation Goals Falter Amid Official Apathy

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 22 2010 (IPS) - At the United Nations, “water and sanitation” have remained inseparable twins on the world body’s social and economic agenda.

Still, and despite the General Assembly’s declaration of 2008 as the “International Year of Sanitation,” water gets higher political priority than toilets.

“Simply put,” Serena O’Sullivan of the London-based End Water Poverty told IPS bluntly, “nobody wants to talk about s–t.”

And that includes politicians and U.N. diplomats, “which is dangerous”, she complains.

As the world commemorated World Water Day on Monday, the U.N.’s Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro said 2.6 billion people worldwide still lack adequate sanitation.

Seven out of 10 people without improved sanitation live in rural areas, but the number of people without improved sanitation is increasing, as urban populations grow, she added.

Although 1.3 billion people have gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, Migiro said, the world is likely to miss the sanitation target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by a billion people by the year 2015.

The goal calls for a reduction by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

On Monday, a coalition of some 150 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) sponsored the “world’s longest toilet queue” to draw public attention to the global sanitation crisis.

Dr. Yong-Ee Cho, president of the South Korea-based World Toilet Association (WTA), whose organisation took part in the campaign, told IPS the entire global community has to share the blame.

“The problem lies in the misplaced priority of international humanitarian aid,” he said.

The main reason for the inefficiency, he pointed out, was general apathy and lack of concern about the 2.6 billion people who live without basic sanitation facilities, including over 2.0 million children dying of toilet-related diseases annually.

“Compared with the economic and disaster relief concerns, the worldwide attention to basic sanitation, including toilets, has been minimal, to say the least,” he added.

O’Sullivan told IPS that sanitation is the uglier, less sexy issue to talk about, as opposed to water.

Therefore, it is necessary to get sanitation on the political agenda “which will help raise the profile of the issue and eventually meaningful action.”

This could possibly come as early as next month when the world’s first high-level meeting on sanitation and water takes place in Washington DC in early April.

Meanwhile, a joint study by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said last week that open defecation – the riskiest sanitation practice of all – is on the decline worldwide, from 25 percent in 1990 to 17 percent in 2008.

This, the study said, was a decrease of about 168 million people practicing open defecation, primarily due to lack of toilets.

“However, this practice is still widely spread in southern Asia, where an estimated 44 percent of the population defecate in the open,” it said.

According to UNICEF, the annual cost of meeting the water and sanitation MDG targets is 11.3 billion dollars, of which 9.5 billion dollars is for sanitation alone.

The average economic benefit of a one dollar investment in sanitation is 9.10 dollars while the equivalent benefit on water is 4.40 dollars.

Asked why sanitation targets had faltered, Dr. Cho of WTA told IPS that both lack of funds and political and social apathy were the primary reasons for the failure.

“The key is how to rouse and mobilise worldwide concern about the seriousness of the problems relating to sanitation,” he said.

“With the stepped-up concern and relief efforts by public and private sectors, we will achieve remarkable results,” he predicted. “We have to continue the sanitation education steadfastly in addition to providing monetary aid to the suffering people living in bad sanitary environments.”

In particular, he pointed out, the private sector should spearhead more concrete and specific aid to help them.

Dr. Cho said private sector organisations should also define the most-needed and appropriate projects in each country and provide the funds required for these projects.

As an NGO, WTA has a two-fold mission: to educate people on the importance of sanitation and to provide adequate sanitation facilities to developing nations.

Asked if WTA was on track, he said that since 2008, WTA has engaged in constructing public toilets as a charity.

In 2008, WTA provided 12 new and “culturally adaptive” public toilets in nine developing countries in Africa and Asia, including Ghana, South Africa, Cameroon, Kenya, Laos, Mongolia, Indonesia, China, and Cambodia.

Currently, it is in the process of building an additional 12 public toilets in Nepal and Vietnam.