What They Are Saying...
The Politics of Toilets
A column devoted to what our partners and others in the field of foreign assistance are saying about development
By Rose George
On Earth Day, let’s not forget
the dirt. The planet is
soiled with sewage, on land
and sea. Our waste is the biggest
marine pollutant there is,
according to the United
Nations Environment
Program. In the developing
world, 90 percent of sewage is
discharged untreated into
oceans and rivers, where its
high nutrient content can suffocate
the life out of seas, contributing
to dead zones (405
worldwide and counting).
There are dead zones on
land, too. Human waste contaminates
environments all
over the world, rich and poor.
Imagine getting up at 4 a.m. in
darkness, trekking to a nearby
bush or field, and going to the
bathroom out in the open.
Imagine then being hit by a
farmer who doesn’t like you
toileting in his field, or being
raped by someone taking
advantage of the dark, which
you need to preserve your
modesty. The quarter of the
world’s population without
access to sanitation—not even
a bucket nor a box—don’t
have to imagine this. It’s their
daily reality. What’s more, all
that excrement lying around
has deadly consequences.
More children—up to 2 million a
year, or one every 15 seconds or
so—die of diarrhea, 90 percent of
which is due to fecal contamination
in food or liquid, than of TB,
malaria or HIV/AIDS. Diarrhea is
the world’s most effective weapon
of mass destruction.
That’s the gloom. The good
news is that it’s solvable. And
solving the world’s sewage mess
would be such a bargain that it
should appeal to politicians holding
the purse strings even in these
straitened times. Investing $1 in
sanitation reaps $8 in health costs
averted and labor days saved.
Look at it another way: not
investing $1 in sanitation loses
you $7. Last year the World Bank
calculated that poor sanitation
cost Cambodia, Indonesia, the
Philippines, and Vietnam
between 1.4 and 7.2 percent of
their GDP. When Peru had a
cholera outbreak in 1991, losses
from tourism and agricultural
revenue were three times greater
than the total money spent on
sanitation in the previous decade.
If numbers are too technical,
let’s get practical: Installing
latrines and clean water supply
in a typical village has dramatic
effects.
In the far reaches of Orissa,
India, I visited the leader of a village named Samiapalli, which
until recently had no sanitation
and endemic open defecation in
nearby woods and along roadsides.
Of course, those weren’t
the villagers’ only problems:
they also faced rampant alcohol
abuse, domestic violence, and
persistent caste discrimination.
Today is different. Although it
took 162 meetings to get everyone
to agree to install one (and
to contribute to the cost), everybody
has a latrine, bathing room,
and running water. With the confidence
gained through those 162
meetings, women had kicked out
the illegal alcohol brewers (and
tied the most persistently violent
men to a lamp post). Eighty percent
more girl children now
went to school, the leader told
me. Women were earning money
growing peanuts and selling
other goods at market with the
free time they had gained from
not having to spend hours finding
somewhere private to do
their business, or to fetch cripplingly
heavy water. Diarrhea
had dropped dramatically (a
latrine can reduce disease by 40
percent; a clean water supply
reduces it by 20 percent).
Sanitation isn’t a symptom of
development. It can trigger it.
“It’s the hardest entry point,”
says Joe Madiath, whose NGO
Gram Vikas had helped bring the
toilet revolution to Samiapalli.
“But once you succeed with sanitation,
you can do anything.”
Samiapalli’s story, and those of
other sanitation success stories,
makes the lack of international
resources for sanitation baffling. A
target of the United Nations’
Millennium Development Goals
(though it was included late and
against great opposition), sanitation
continues to lag far behind
access to clean water, an easier
topic to sell and publicize.
Celebrities happily promote a village’s
shiny new faucets, preferably
with a photogenic child
nearby, but fail to make the logical
step over to the new latrines that
have lengthened that child’s life
and enabled her to go to school.
These priorities persist behind
the cameras. The United Nations
Human Development Report
noted in 2006 that water and sanitation
budgets in most countries
are less than 0.5 percent of GDP;
and of that pittance, 90 percent
goes on clean water supply.
Things may be improving, but
slowly: The times when much of
the U.S.’s overseas water and
sanitation budget went toward
restoring infrastructure in places
it had helped destroy—notably
Iraq and Afghanistan—are thankfully
over. [Senator] Paul
Simon’s Water for the Poor Act
has actually been allocated proper
money ($300 million), and the
Reports to Congress about the act
laudably mention “sanitation.”
But there are still 994 references
to water in the report, and only
249 mentions of “sanitation.”
This is understandable,
given how long sanitation has
been in water’s shadow. And
the fact that sanitation is mentioned
at all is cheering. But
we must not let that semantic
imbalance translate into an
imbalance of funds allocated
for sanitation—the most offtrack
target, after all, of all the
targets in the Millennium
Development Goals.
The International Year of
Sanitation ended in December,
but our pressure on politicians
and donor agencies should not.
Funds that have long gushed
away to the cause of clean
water, at the expense of sanitation,
should be diverted back.
In financially straitened times,
it makes economic sense to
invest in the most cost-effective
health prevention mechanism
we have. With a new
Global Sanitation Fund up and
running, it couldn’t be easier.
Earth Day is as good a day as
any to remember that sewage
may be dirt, but sanitation
shouldn’t be treated like it.
Rose George is a freelance
journalist and author of “The
Big Necessity,” a report on the
realities of the world’s sanitation
situation. She posted the
above article on Earth Day,
April 22, at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/needtoknow. It is reprinted with
her permission. ★
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