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Facts
- World Toilet Day, 19 November, aims to improve
toilets for all through:
- requesting better equality
(more facilities for women);
- more accessibility and
special provisions (for the disabled and mothers with babies);
- improved
cleanliness(for everyone);
- providing more toilets (for
the less fortunate).
- 1.1 billion people, or
roughly one sixth of the world's population, do not have access to safe water
and 2.6 billion people, or two fifths of the world's population, do not have access
to adequate sanitation.
- Between 1990 and 2004 more than 1.2 billion people
worldwide gained access to improved sanitation.
- Lack of sanitation increases
the risk of outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and dysentery.
- In 2006, 1.8
million children under age 5 (an average of 4900 every day) died from the consequences
of unsafe water and inadequate hygiene.
- For every $1 spent on water and
sanitation an average of $8 is saved in health costs and productivity gained.
- Water, hygiene and sanitation interventions reduce diarrhoea incidence
by 26% and mortality by 65%.
Sources
World Health Organization: http://www.who.int
International Year of Sanitation; http://esa.un.org/iys |
BackgroundWhat
is sanitation? Human waste, (excreta) is smelly, attracts flies, and is
personal. Unless it is managed effectively disease can spread quickly, killing
thousands. Sanitation is the process of preventing human, animal, and insect contact
with excreta to avoid the spread of diseases. One gram of faeces can contain
10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1 thousand cyst parasites and about a
hundred worm eggs so the danger of disease is massive. When any waste
is exposed and clean water and hygiene education are limited, all people
in the community are vulnerable to illness caused by faeces. How does
sanitation impact people's lives? Without a clean, safe toilet close to
home people are forced to live in an unhealthy and unpleasant environment. Each
year 1.8 million children die and many more are sick with diseases such as cholera,
typhoid and dysentery because of unclean water and poor sanitation. Having to
go to the toilet in the open or sharing facilities with hundreds of others, particularly
if you are suffering with diarrhoea, is extremely embarrassing and unsafe for
everyone's health. Women and girls are especially disadvantaged because they often
have to wait until it is dark, which can lead to illness or the danger of attack.
Sickness takes children away from school and adults away from earning an income.
Medical expenses make massive demands on the limited incomes of the poor.
Sanitation enhances dignity, privacy and safety, especially for women and girls.
Clean, safe toilets and hand-washing facilities at home and school help children's
ability to learn. Improved health helps women and men earn a living. Effective
sanitation means the environment is safer and cleaner for all activities – children
can play, food can be prepared safely, homes can be kept cleaner. The ladder
of sanitation Sanitation may be as cheap and simple as a protected pit
latrine or as expensive and complex as a flush toilet with sewerage. The further
up the ‘ladder', the greater the benefits for people and the environment. The
simplest form of sanitation is the pit latrine with a squat slab cover to stop
contact with excreta by humans, animals and insects and a shelter around it for
privacy and protection. The hole may be lined to prevent it collapsing. Pit toilets
are used in rural or wilderness areas. Their advantages are that they are cheap
and easy to build and maintain but they can smell and attract flies and the pit
must be moved or emptied regularly. Moving up the ladder is the self ventilated
improved pit latrine (VIP). These are a little more expensive and use slightly
more complicated technology. A vent pipe higher than the shelter reduces the smells
and flies. They are still cheap to build and easy to maintain but are dependent
on wind and are dark inside. The next step is the pour-flush latrine which
uses a pan with a water-seal connected to a pit by a pipe. This stops flies and
smells from coming out of the pit, but a water source is needed. Further
up the ladder are composting toilets which vary greatly in construction and expense.
They all use micro-organisms to break down the waste into organic compost or manure.
Various systems of vents or fans may be used to speed up the process of composting.
Advantages of composting toilets include reuse of the compost as fertiliser, reduced
pollution of ground water and lack of dependence on water, but skilled labour
is required for the construction. At the top of the ladder is a full sewerage
system, which is an extensive series of pipes leading to a sewage treatment plant.
It is costly to install and maintain such systems and rapid urbanisation is stretching
most existing systems beyond capacity. Hygiene education The supply
of latrines and toilets by themselves will not improve health. All members of
the community need to regularly use them and wash their hands after use to break
the faecal-oral cycle in the spread of disease. This requires a supply of water.
Where toilets have been supplied to communities there sometimes has been reluctance
to use them. People may be embarrassed, dislike being enclosed in a smelly environment
or the long wait for others. Changing old habits of defecation in open areas is
a major part of improving the effectiveness of even simple sanitation systems.
Millennium Development Goal and the International Year of Sanitation Although
water and sanitation have been linked for many years, improvement to water access
has made far bigger gains than improvements to sanitation. Over 1.2 billion people
lack access to safe water while 2.6 billion lack access to sanitation. This situation
is even worse in rural areas where only 53% of the population have access to sanitation
while about 80% of the urban population have access to sanitation. The
United Nations Millennium Development Goals and International Year of Sanitation
aims to bring this smelly and embarrassing problem into the open in the hope of
bringing about the changes needed. The (MDG) target for sanitation is ‘to
halve, by 2015, the proportion of the world's population without sustainable access
to basic sanitation.' There are major challenges to bridge the great gap between
access in rural and urban areas and meet the needs of rapidly expanding cities.
The International Year of Sanitation will help position the crisis in sanitation
more prominently on the global agenda by raising the issue's profile with politicians,
civil society, the media and the general public. It aims to raise awareness for
the worldwide sanitation crisis; generate political will and concerted action
for improving the sanitation situation and increase the willingness of communities,
governments and other donors to invest into sanitation
Australia's
response The Australian Government has long recognized the importance
of clean water and sanitation as a cornerstone for development. It integrates
water issues into country and regional programs, adopting long-term planning and
ensuring active community participation. Some specific programs include:
- The Water and Sanitation Project (South Asia) to help institutional reform
and collaboration in South Asia .
- The Bangalore Water Supply and Sanitation
Project to help prepare a water supply and environmental sanitation master plan
for the city's 6 million inhabitants.
- The Kiritamati Water Supply and
Sanitation Project to give support to civil works that extract and deliver water
from underground sources and to construct composting toilets that help reduce
contamination of groundwater supplies from septic tanks and pit latrines.
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