DAVID ADAMS looks at the findings of the latest State of the World’s Toilets report from WaterAid…
War-torn South Sudan, the newest nation in the world, is the worst country for access to sanitation facilities with an estimated 84 per cent of residents living in urban areas unable to use a toilet and every second person going to the toilet in the open.
Meanwhile, in India, 157 million people in urban areas live without a safe, private toilet, and 41 million go to the toilet in the open, producing enough waste to fill eight Olympic-sized swimming pools every day.
EQUAL ACCESS?: Some 700 million people still doesn’t have access to safe, private and clean toilets. PICTURE: YS Wong/www.freeimages.com
CASE STUDIES FROM THE WATERAID REPORT
INDIA
Uma Devi lives in a slum in Patna, in Bihar state, and has been a ‘manual scavenger’ – clearing out latrines by hand – for more than 50 years. Manual scavenging is now illegal, but the practice persists. Uma was married off at 11 and her husband’s family forced her into this livelihood. Today, as millions of Indians build better lives, Uma and people like her are condemned to an existence of squalor and humiliation. “My day starts with someone coming to call me to their house to do this work. I take my bucket and the bowl to scoop up the waste. I collect the waste in the bucket and carry it on my head to the dumping place. The smell is unbearable so I try to go as fast as I can. I’ve fainted and vomited when working. It is very dirty doing this job. Waste used to get on me all the time, but I’ve learned how to do it without letting things spill on me. I’ve tried to get a sanitation job, but I am old now.”
NIGERIA
Francis Alagun is a 35-year-old father of three and works as a fisherman. He has lived in the waterside Ago-Egun slum community in Bariga, Lagos, since he was born. “The major problems facing our community are the lack of drinkable water, toilet system, electricity and schools for the kids. During the rainy season, the area gets flooded because of the high tide. It used to get flooded to chest level and belongings got destroyed. Now we’ve used sand bags so that it only floods to knee level.” For Francis’s community, stopping the flood water is about reducing disease in the slum, because the surrounding water is an open toilet. Everyone in the neighbourhood has little choice but to take a boat under a nearby bridge to defecate straight into the water.
Source: Overflowing Cities report
And while much progress has been made in providing access to toilets in Asian nations including China, Vietnam and Cambodia, in Indonesia 38 million urban-dwellers remain without access to safe, private toilets and 18 million still practice open defecation.
Such are the findings of WaterAid’s State of the World’s Toilets 2016, released late last week to mark World Toilet Day. The report, which is titled Overflowing Cities and which is the second annual report of its kind released by the organisation, shows that while, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population now live in towns and cities, almost a fifth of all those that do – more than 700 million people – still live without a decent toilet.
“To put that into context, the queue of people waiting for toilets in our cities and towns would stretch around the world 29 times,” the report notes.
Of these, 600 million rely on toilets that don’t meet minimum hygiene, safety or privacy requirements – such as dirty and crowded communal toilets, rudimentary pit and bucket latrines – while the remaining 100 million don’t even have access to any system to remove human waste, leaving them with “little option” but to practice open defecation.
The report says that, even putting the “humiliation and health risks to people living in slums” aside, “this lack of sanitation threatens the health and security of the city as a whole, and the world beyond”.
It says diseases like cholera and Ebola spread “faster and further” without good sanitation and good hygiene practices to stop them. “In today’s interconnected world, many of the diseases found in an urban slum in South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa can quickly become an issue for the developed world too.”
WaterAid is calling on governments and donors to provide more money to better address the issue so that everyone living in urban areas, including slums, has access to a safe, private and clean toilet. It says that more intentional action is required if the world is to reach the Sustainable Development Goal of delivering sanitation to everyone, everywhere by 2030.
Rosie Wheen, WaterAid Australia’s chief executive, says the report exposes the lack of progress being made in several countries despite “rapid economic growth”.
“Often politicians prefer to invest in roads and other visible infrastructure and neglect the dirty issue of sanitation. But good sanitation is essential to public health. Every town and city in the world needs to prioritise providing safe sanitation services to all the population in order to create a healthier, more sustainable future.”
The report shows that the top 10 nations where the highest percentages of the urban population live without access to safe, private toilets are all located in Africa. As well as South Sudan, they include Madagascar, Congo, Ghana and Sierra Leone.
Meanwhile the top 10 nations with the highest numbers of urban-dwellers without access to safe, private toilets include, as well as India and China, Nigeria, Indonesia, Russia and Bangladesh.
And with the exception of the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati, the countries with the highest percentage of people living in urban environments who are practicing open defecation are also all located in Africa with the list once again topped by South Sudan but also including Sao Tome and Principe, Eritrea, and Liberia.
On the positive side of the ledger, an additional 9.14 million people received access to sanitation facilities in China between 2000 and 2015 along with 3.38 million people in Brazil over the same period, 2.89 million people in North Korea, and 2.82 million people in Vietnam.
As well as calling for more action to address the issue of safe access to toilets, WaterAid is also calling for better coordination of efforts at the local level and for sanitation workers to be given the “respect they deserve” including adequate working conditions with stable employment, safety and decent pay.
~ www.wateraid.org/au/news/news/overflowing-cities-wtd-report
