PORT LOKO, Sierra Leone, 1 July 2009 – Practicing good hygiene is anything but a chore for the children of E.M. Primary School in Laya, in the Port Loko district of Sierra Leone.

“We learn about good hygiene through games and sports,” says Fatmata, 12, a proud member of the School Health Club. “It’s a lot of fun, but we also have a serious responsibility to pass these messages on to our families and friends.”

Before the School Health Club members and their teachers got involved, infectious diseases caused by poor sanitation had been rife in Laya. Now, thanks to the club’s efforts, the majority of families in the surrounding villages have access to a latrine.

Children as agents of change

The club, which meets twice a week, is supported by UNICEF and a local non-governmental organization. Its goal is to promote the construction and use of latrines in Port Loko.

As an example of a School-led Total Sanitation (SLTS) programme, the club empowers children to be the agents of change within their communities by encouraging local families to construct latrines and end the practice of open defecation.

Fatmata and her family are in one of the households that took action as a result of the SLTS programme. Following the death of Fatmata’s father, life for her family was difficult. With nine children to support, her mother had little money available to spend on sanitation supplies. Due to a lack of facilities, the entire family was required to practice open defecation in the surrounding bush.

“I used to be so afraid of going to the toilet, especially because of the snakes,” explained Fatmata.

The introduction of SLTS to Laya encouraged Fatmata’s mother to make a change. Earlier this year, with help from her neighbours, she began to construct a latrine using local materials. The latrine is now complete and the family uses it on a daily basis.

Keeping children healthy and educated

UNICEF believes that working with schoolchildren is one of the most effective methods of promoting good hygiene and sanitation practices across communities. And in Sierra Leone, such interventions are greatly needed.

Communicable diseases, such as diarrhoea, also cause many school-age children to regularly miss school. Families living on limited finances are further strained when these diseases require costly medical treatments.

UNICEF and its partners are working to ensure that SLTS, combined with other health and education interventions, enables children like Fatmata to remain healthy and continue their education.

Source – UNICEF

Rural Sanitation

There has also been tremendous increase in the access to sanitation facilities by rural households. The sanitation coverage among rural households has increased from 21.9 percent in 2001 to 27.3 percent in 2004 and has more than doubled since then to 63.91 per cent (of 2001 Census households) as on May 20, 2009. The total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) is one of the eight flagship programmes of the Government. TSC projects have been sanctioned in 593 rural districts of the country at a total outlay of Rs. 17,885 crore with a Central share of Rs. 11,094 crore. Since 1999, over 5,56 crore toilets have been provided for rural households under TSC. A significant achievement has also been the construction of of 8.71 lakh school toilets and 2.72 lakh Anganwadi toilets. With increasing budgetary allocations and focus on rural areas, the number of households being provided with toilets annually has increased from only 24,41 lakh in 2002-03 to 98.7 lakh in 2006-07.

Source – PIB Press Release

The aim of the two-day event is to initiate competitive research project proposals in the field of water management, sanitation and sludge treatment for the upcoming calls of the EU Framework Programme for Research (FP7) in the field of Environment. Following the joint Africa-EU strategy (2007) the European Union launches a cross thematic ‘Africa call’ with 63 million Euros available for funding.

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In Conversation with Jack Sim, World Toilet Organization, June 30, 2009 by Bernard Leong

In the book “The Power of Unreasonable People“, a definitive guide (by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan) on the social entrepreneurship movement has mentioned a Singaporean social entrepreneur by the name of Jack Sim, who started the World Toilet Organization (WTO) and how his work provided a scaling solution for governments to set standards on sanitation.

Earning two prestigous global social entrepreneurship accolades: Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur and Ashoka Global Fellow, Jack has started a global clean toilet movement that help governments to shape sanitation policies. One success story is that the World Toilet Organization assisted the Chinese government in adopting the standards for lavatories before the Beijing Olympics last year. We have managed to get Jack to come on board for an interview, to tell us about the story behind World Toilet Organization and his views on the trends of social entrepreneurship in Singapore.

BL: Hi Jack, thank you for agreeing to an interview on SGE. First of all, tell us about your background and what are you working on before embarking on the World Toilet Organization (WTO)?
Jack Sim: I was a businessman since age 25 and at 40, I realized since our average life-span is 80, time is the currency of life and I need to use it meaningfully with a sense of urgency. Money becomes not an interesting pursuit anymore because I have to exchange time for money. It is better to exchange time for more meaningful impact for others.

BL: What inspired you to start the World Toilet Organization?
Jack Sim: In my search for meaning, I read one morning in the newspaper when PM Goh Chok Tong mentioned that we should measure our graciousness according to the cleanliness of our public toilets. I thought this is my calling and started Restroom Association of Singapore. After LianHe Zao Bao’s report, the public’s response was; “Somebody ought to have started this long ago.” They like it.

In 1999, I went to Tokyo for the Asia-Pacific Toilet Symposium and found 15 countries represented there. I wanted to bring that meeting to Singapore. Thailand and Vietnam also wanted to do the same. After my impromptu presentation about how the event will be organized and run like a swiss-watch, no traffic jams, global media coverage, professional management, great shopping, high impact, etc, both Vietnam and Thailand said: ” We are not presenting, we all going to Singapore.”

Next, I asked where is the world’s HQ for our movement. They said there was none. The Japanese host declined to lead because of language difficulty. So I offered to start World Toilet Organization in Singapore as a service platform and HQ. They agreed.

Later, the inaugural meeting became World Toilet Summit and our birthday 19 November became celebrated as World Toilet Day.

The first World Toilet Summit took the global media by storm and suddenly we are booked for 2002 in Seoul ( host Mayor of Suwon City/ Korea Clean Toilet Association), 2003 Taipei ( host Taipei Vice Mayor/ Taiwan Toilet Association), 2004 Beijing ( host Beijing Tourism Bureau). Later, 2005 Belfast Lord Mayor/ British Toilet Association, 2006 Moscow Mayor/ Russian Toilet Association, 2007 New Delhi President of India/ Sulabh International, 2008 Macao Asian Development Bank, and 2009 in Singapore this year.

It started as a hobby but got so addictive that I left my business operation to my managers and work full-time pro bono at WTO since 2005.

BL: What is the mission of the World Toilet Organization?
Jack Sim: We started as a clean toilet movement to improve design, cleaning and behavior. Later, we also extend to poverty, rural and slums toilets, sewerage, to meet the MDGs.

Through the massive media engagement globally, politicians and the global community found legitimacy to speak about toilets and we can attribute ourselves to the success in breaking the global taboo and bringing the issues to mainstream and center-stage attention.

Read More – SGentrepreneurs

Scientists have shown that using mud from waste water treatment plants as a partial alternative fuel can enable cement factories to reduce their CO2 emissions and comply with the Kyoto Protocol, as well as posing no risk to human health and being profitable. These are the results of an environmental impact assessment.

Dependency on oil and coal could be coming to an end. Researchers from the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) have analysed the environmental and human health impacts of an alternative fuel that solves various problems simultaneously. This is the solid waste from the water treatment plants of large cities.

The scientists have carried out the first study into this method at a cement plant in Vallcarca (Catalonia), which has been producing cement for more than 100 years, and they confirm in the latest issue of the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research that it is “the best option for getting rid of mud that would have had to be dumped elsewhere, while also powering the plant”.

[...] Up to 20% of the fossil fuel energy used at the Catalan plant has now been substituted for the fuel from waste water treatment plant mud.

One of the most important issues for the URV scientists is the reduction in environmental impact, and consequently the health risks for people living near the plants. The experiment with the mud has led to a 140,000 tonne reduction in CO2 emissions between 2003 and 2006, and will have limited the potential deaths from exposure to chemical pollutants. In addition, the study shows that using this green fuel would reduce the cancer rate by 4.56 per million inhabitants.

The researchers say it is essential to carry out separate studies for each plant because “we still don’t know whether this will be positive for the whole cement industry”, according to Domingo. However, if the conditions are right, using mud from waste water treatment plants in cement factories is “a very good solution”, he concludes

Source: Plataforma SINC, ScienceDaily, 23 Jun 2009

Could horse poo help save the planet?

An industrial designer has come up with the idea of a waterless toilet actually made of horse dung, which she believes could be a big help to the 40% of the world’s population that does not have access to proper toilets.

Virginia Gardiner’s loo design is comprised of 90% horse dung. The toilet effectively becomes a storage device for human waste. The full loo can then be sealed and be taken to outdoor biogestors where the complete package is converted into biofuel for cooking.

London-based Gardiner, a contributor to Dwell magazine, believes human poo has the potential to be a valuable commodity – a country mile away from the flush-and-forget attitude of many in the Western world.

Gardiner’s invention has the potential to reduce illness and death among those without access to proper toilets.

The idea has already received recognition. It was a finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge and was acknowledged at the AIGA Aspen Design Challenge.

June 25, 2009—The Lao People’s Democratic Republic lost an estimated 5.6 percent of gross domestic product, or US$193 million, due to poor sanitation and hygiene, according to a report released today by the Water and Sanitation Program.

As the impacts evaluated in Economic Impacts of Sanitation in Lao PDR, health contributes 60 percent to overall estimated economic costs, followed by 18 percent for accessing clean drinking water, 13 percent for additional time to access unimproved sanitation, and nine percent due to tourism losses.

“These impacts are expected to cause a mixture of direct financial losses as well as indirect or nonmonetary economic losses to the Lao population, who have to pay for health services or for accessing clean water supplies, or who may lose income due to poor health,” said the report’s author and Senior Economist with the Water and Sanitation Program Guy Hutton.

Poor sanitation, including hygiene, causes at least three million disease episodes and 6000 premature deaths annually. The resulting economic impact is more than US$115 million (LAK 1.1 trillion) per year based on 2006 data, the report says.

Poor sanitation also contributes significantly to water pollution, adding to the cost of households accessing safe and clean water supplies. The associated economic costs of polluted water attributed to poor sanitation exceed US$35 million (LAK 350 billion) per year. This excludes the costs of accessing clean water for non-drinking purposes, as well as loss of productive value for fisheries and agriculture due to polluted water.

The report adds that poor sanitation may also contribute to over US$17 million (LAK 150 billion) per year in tourism losses.

Diarrhoea kills more children than Aids or malaria. But clean water supplies are only part of the solution.

Diarrhoea. The runs. The squits. The “insert funny name here”. Diarrhoea is funny, right? Because diarrhoea is something that you get from a bad kebab or some dodgy prawns. Because it is curable; not fatal; benign. It can be all those things, but only if your surroundings are not continually contaminated with the faecal particles that probably gave you the diarrhoea in the first place. Four in ten people in the world (2.6 billion) live with no sanitation whatsoever. When there’s no good containment – a toilet, or a pit latrine will do – faecal particles will be tramped on by people’s feet and carried on their fingers into food and water, with horrible consequences. Diarrhoea is the second biggest killer of children under five in the world. It kills more children than HIV/Aids or malaria. A child dies of those banal squits every 15 seconds.

So it is good news that the World Health Organisation this month recommended that vaccines for rotavirus be standard for children in the developing world. Rotavirus does not cause all diarr­hoea, but it causes a lot of it. Instead of a single vaccine dose, however, harried nurses may have to give several, as diarrhoea makes it difficult for a child to retain anything. Diarrhoea is the reason you can have a malnourished child in a well-fed family. Because human faeces can carry 50 ­­­­com­municable diseases, they are an efficient weapon of mass destruction. Half of the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people ­suffering from what are generally known as ­water-related diseases. Actually, they’re shit-­related diseases.

A couple of years ago, readers of the British Medical Journal voted the toilet the best medical advance of the past 200 years, over penicillin and the pill. They knew that before the flush toilet became the norm in the 19th century, one in two children in London died before the age of five. With toilets, sewers and hand-washing with soap, child mortality dropped dramatically. ­Today, we in the developed world take these things for granted. We do not give much thought to the women who must get up at 4am in darkness, trek to a nearby bush or field, and try to do their business risking rape and snakebites. It can be easy to ignore, even when you live among it.

I have met countless Indians, who live in a country where 700 million people have no choice but to do open defecation, who claim never to have seen anyone toileting in public. Yet visit any Indian – or Indonesian, or Vietnamese, or Malawian – village, and along the roads you will see men and women, elderly and young, squatting by the roadside, the women trying and failing to keep both their faces and backsides covered for modesty’s sake. “Before, they would have been jumping up at every passing car,” my Indian companion told me. “Now there’s too much traffic. They’d be up and down like a yo-yo.”

Open defecation, and its concomitant diseases, is not just unpleasant. It also costs the world a fortune. Last year, the World Bank calculated that poor sanitation cost Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam between 1.4 and 7.2 per cent of GDP (not to mention the girls who do not go to school because there is no private latrine; or the mothers who cannot work because they are trekking into the bushes for ­privacy). Yet sanitation is the most cost-effective disease prevention tool we have. The World Bank economist Guy Hutton has estimated that investing $1 in sanitation saves $7 in healthcare costs and labour days that aren’t lost. 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.

Yet, as Fatal Neglect, a recent report by WaterAid demonstrated, money continues to flow towards more fashionable diseases and causes. In Madagascar, for example, 0.1 per cent of the population has HIV/Aids, and UNAids found there were too few Aids deaths to estimate. Yet HIV/Aids receives five times more funding than sanitation, though diarrhoea kills 14,000 Madagascan children every year. Antiretroviral therapies, the most common prevention tool against Aids, costs $922 per Daly (Disability-Adjusted Life Year, a standard health-prevention unit of calculation). Sanitation and hygiene promotion costs $11 and $3 respectively. By any measure, sanitation is a bargain.

Sanitation activists do not just look wistfully at the money flowing into HIV/Aids. They also see funds gushing into clean water supplies, an easier cause to sell and publicise. Water and sanitation budgets are usually a pittance (often 0.1 per cent of GDP), and of that, 90 per cent goes on clean water supplies. I have lost count of how many celebrities have put their names to clean water charities, happily photographed in front of a bright, shiny new tap, preferably with a ­photogenic child nearby. A laudable cause, but a clean water supply reduces disease by 20 per cent, while a latrine can reduce it by 40 per cent.

In a slum not far from Calcutta, I met Sandya Barui. She was 60 (and looked 80), but had dug her own latrine pit and built her own superstructure from spare tin and banana leaves. Before that, she had had to do her business in the ban­ana fields behind her home, and it was “sinful”. Children would come and look at you as you squatted, she said. And she was spending 100 rupees ($2.50) a month on medicine, which was 100 rupees more than she had.

Then some visitors came to the slum and asked for a tour, and at the end they asked to see where people went for open defecation. Such shame! Then they asked people to estimate how many truck-loads of shit they were leaving in the open. It was a shock, Sandya said – as it was when people noticed that a plate of excrement had been brought to the meeting place and the flies were hopping merrily from the shit to the plate of chapattis next to it.

Children immediately ran off and began digging, but Sandya’s was one of the first proper ­lat­rines to be built. She spent 700 rupees on it, and thinks it is worth every paise. Diarrhoea rates in the area have dropped dramatically, and more children are going to school (studies have shown that latrines can increase school attendance, particularly among girls, by up to 20 per cent).

Sandya has done her sums. She knows that good sanitation adds up. If only the politicians holding the purse strings could figure it out too.

Rose George’s book “The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste” is published by Portobello Books (£12.99)

Source – The New Statesman, June 25, 2009

To mark the midway point of the Katine project, and ahead of mid-point reviews to be conducted by our independent evaluator and Amref, this week Madeleine Bunting examines progress in each of the project’s five components. In the third of her reviews she looks at water and sanitation.

Water and sanitation is the aspect of the project which, to be honest, most troubles me. We were told in the last Amref report that eight new boreholes had been drilled, but it seems that there is a problem with several of them because of the pipes that were used. There is to be a survey of the quality of the water, but villagers are anxious that the deposits of iron that have appeared in the water from these boreholes are in fact harmful, and some believe them to be worms. Richard M Kavuma, our reporter, wrote about this problem a month ago.

Read More – The Guardian

Many water charities have sprung up within the last year that are using the Internet and associated social media to raise funds for projects in developing countries. With their Toilet Twinning campaign, UK-based CORD is one of the first to focus on raising money to build latrines.

Toilet Twinning links toilets around the world with those being built in Burundi by families returning from exile in Tanzania. For £60 (US$ 98 or € 70) people, schools or organisations can “twin” their toilets with one in a Rutana Province village – and track it down to its exact location via Google Earth. “Twinners” receive a special one off certificate to display in their toilets picturing their twin, its exact location and Google map reference.

Improving water and sanitation is key to CORD’s programme in remote Giharo Commune. Over the past 18 months CORD helped local returnees to build 870 pit latrines, each benefiting a family of six. With their campaign CORD plans to double that number. Blocks of toilets have also been built at 3 primary schools and alongside water points.

The first 500 Twinnings are on sale now via a special CORD website: www.toilettwinning.org. English singer Corinne Bailey Rae and the Bishop of Coventry are two famous toilet twinners featured on the web site.

Bishop of Coventry Rt. Reverend Christopher Cocksworth. Photo: CORD

The site has a range a fun and serious stuff abouts toilets and sanitation, including a link to another fundraising campaign led by former Las Vegas singer Gino Federici who now “sings for toilets”.

And for those would love to gift a toilet but find CORD’s £ 60 a bit too expensive, they can go to Oxfam who will “build a bog” for £50 (US$ 82 or € 59) and cheaper still, sister organisation Oxfam Novib in the Netherlands, will build the same “bog” for only € 45 (£ 38 = US$ 63)!

Source: CORD, 09 Jun 2009