UN Millenium Goals at UN Headquarters. Credit: Babucke
By Rich Bowden:
Sanitation uptake in developing countries can be improved using a more innovative and market-based approach, recent research by the World Health Organisation (WHO) has claimed.
The organization says latest analysis shows the sanitation goals set out by the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to be lagging far behind those for the improvement of the number of people with access to a clean drinking water supply. The MDG 7 — the goal concerned with environmental sustainability — aims to halve the proportion of people living without access to an improved source of drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.
According to the bulletin, the providing of basic sanitation is regarded with some suspicion amongst recipients in the developing world with many preferring to revert to traditional methods of sanitation, such as defecating in the open. The antipathy towards numerous sanitation programs has resulted in the failure of numerous programs to supply either free or heavily subsidized toilets to those without access to basic sanitation.
This failure in the acceptance of basic sanitation facilities has caused a re-think among policy makers looking to reach the 2015 MDG sanitation targets. According to WHO/UNICEF projected estimates, the number of people without access to “improved sanitation” will fall to 33 percent by 2015, however this falls far short of the MDG’s target of 23 percent of the global population of 7.3 billion.
Projected calculations from WHO show that, should current trends continue, 2.4 billion people will still lack “improved sanitation” by 2015 with 1.1 billion of those people still defecating in the open with the associated health risks.
Many recipients of the toilets have rejected them because they fail to see the need for them, the WHO news bulletin quoted Jack Sim, founder of the Singapore-based World Toilet Organization as saying. Sim told WHO that without a demand for the facilities, there is no supply, distribution network or interest.
He added that people often preferred to dodge the issue of sanitation.
“When people talk about sanitation, they usually talk water; it is easier from a social point of view. They even describe human feces as ‘waste water’, ‘grey water’, ‘black water’, anything but what it is,” he said.
The need to find innovative ways to improve the uptake of improved sanitation facilities is apparent said Anand Chiplunkar, principal water supply and sanitation specialist at the Asian Development Bank, who pointed out the struggle aid workers have to combat traditional practices.
“The economic returns of good sanitation have been demonstrated universally. We must find innovative ways of translating them into effective and sustainable solutions to provide environmentally sound sanitation. The task is difficult, as we need to overcome traditions, beliefs, politics and poverty,” said Chiplunkar.
An internal analysis by the World Bank had found that the most unsuccessful sanitation programs tended to be those that had been more heavily subsidized or provided free of charge.
“The reasons for this are interesting; in some cases the subsidies are given as a sort of reward to political leadership for universal toilet construction,” WHO quoted Jean Humphrey, an associate professor at the US’s Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The leadership, anxious for the money, impose toilets on the most resistant households, who then do not use them because they didn’t want them in the first place.”
She added that many sanitation programs failed to address the need to change people’s behavior.
“In my mind, the cause of failure may be not so much that money was spent on subsidies, as that money was not spent on social mediation,” Humphrey said.
Jack Sim told the UN’s Health Organization that changes needed to be made to programs which would be designed to to create more of a demand for toilets. He said a program currently being rolled out in Cambodia, and which would be extended to other developing countries in the next three years, had made the facilities more acceptable.
“Our idea is to manufacture bright, colourful toilets that are simple to use, easy to maintain and can be bought for less than US$ 100. The only way to supply toilets in a sustainable way is to create a market and a demand for them. When people invest their money in a toilet, they are more likely to accept it and use it,” he said.
Originally published in OOSKAnews.
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