Today is World Toilet Day

Don't Laugh! It really is. Designated by the World Toilet Organization to highlight the sanitation needs in under developed nations.

In Liberia, 3.5 million people share 1,600 toilets. Many people just use the nearest bush or beach, when millions of people do it, it creates quite the problem.

We look at sanitation in Liberia in this story from IRIN. It shows the difficulty buying water for sanitation, and how the problem can accumulate in Liberia's slums.

While rural water and sanitation facilities usually fare worse than urban ones in West Africa, partly due to government expenditure patterns and relatively higher poverty levels, the capital Monrovia’s “dire sanitation facilities” bucks this trend, according to WASH consortium advocacy manager Muyatwa Sitali.

Congested housing, no requirement that landlords provide working toilets, and virtually no urban planning have combined to create lethal sanitation conditions in the capital, Sitali said. Monrovia’s population has almost tripled since the end of the war in 2003, straining the capacity of the city’s outdated water-pipe network.

“Most of our pipes and other facilities are obsolete and need to be upgraded to improve water supply,” the Water and Sewer Corporation’s Tulay said. But many of the facilities were looted during the war.

In the Monrovia neighbourhood of West Point up to 70,000 people share 32 public washrooms which have four functioning toilets among them. “And this is one of the better managed water and sanitation areas in the capital,” Sitali said.

Cannot afford to flush

The decrepit infrastructure means toilet-users may have to use up to four gallons of water each time they flush, according to civil servant Florence Nimely, who lives in the city-centre.

“At US 25 cents a gallon, for some it is a choice between flushing and affording to buy food at the end of the day,” Nimely said. Per capita income in Liberia was US 40 cents per day in 2007, according to the World Bank.

Most Liberians are forced to buy all their water – for drinking and other uses – from street vendors at inflated prices.

“When some of my neighbours defecate they cannot get enough water to flush their toilets, so they sometimes throw the faeces around the place, exposing us all to health hazards,” Monrovia shopkeeper Samuel Tweh told IRIN.

Without regular running water, waste flushed into the system often backs up, causing sewage to spill out of manholes into the streets, according to inhabitants who rated sanitation as their top development priority in a series of assessments undertaken by the NGO Water Aid in 2008.

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

Link to full article. May expire in future.