A life or death issue for world's poor

from the Pretoria News

Sanitation just doesn't exist for many people in the world. A UK charity has marked Monday as World toilet Day, to shed light on poor hygiene in underdeveloped countries. - Kale

By Pascal Fletcher

Dakar - Going to the toilet is a matter of life and death in the world's poorest countries where lack of sanitation and poor hygiene kill hundreds of thousands, especially children, every year.

"One in four people in the world don't have a safe place to go to the toilet," said Barbara Frost, chief executive of UK-based charity WaterAid which marked World Toilet Day on Monday by launching an international campaign for more hygiene awareness and investment in sanitation.

Speaking from Mali in West Africa, Frost said the absence of clean toilet facilities, access to safe water and efficient sanitation was directly related to the spread of diseases, most preventable, that killed 1,8 million children a year.

These problems are visible in many cities and towns across Africa, the world's poorest continent, where canals or ditches carrying raw sewage often run through crowded neighbourhoods before seeping untreated into rivers, lakes and the open sea.

Parks, roadsides, backyards and fly-blown refuse dumps often serve as public toilets. The risk of epidemics worsens in Africa when floods sweep through towns and villages, spreading water infected with faeces and germs over an even wider area.

"It's a life and death issue," Frost told Reuters by telephone from the Malian capital Bamako, where she joined President Amadou Toumani Toure in stressing the importance of developing sanitation and hygiene infrastructure in Africa.

She said the international community tended to focus on providing food and water in its anti-poverty efforts, but appeared to have a blind spot over the sanitation issue.

"It's the neglected Millennium Development Goal, because I guess sanitation is not something that people like talking about, it has been completely neglected," said Frost.

She urged African leaders and the world's most developed countries to put the issue back high on the agenda of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals which aim to halve extreme poverty in the world by 2015.

"Investment in sanitation can make the biggest difference in terms of economic development, social development and people getting out of poverty," Frost said.

But without safe water, sanitation and improved hygiene practices, efforts to reduce poverty were being undermined.

Frost said that at the current rate of change, the aimed-for UN anti-poverty goals would not be achieved until 50 years after their 2015 target year, and Sub-Saharan Africa was one of the regions suffering most from development lag.

WaterAid's website marked World Toilet Day with a posting saying that 2,6 billion people in the world do not have somewhere safe, private or hygienic to go to the toilet.

# Additional reporting by Tiemoko Diallo in Bamako

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