One of the most taboo topics in development that you don’t hear often is the lack of toilets in the developing world. To bring awareness to this issue, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, AED, PATH and Water Advocates are releasing a new documentary titled, “World’s Toilet Crisis.”

An estimated 40 percent of the global population does not have access to a toilet and is forced to defecate in public or communal spaces, a common practice that enables the rapid spread of diseases like diarrhea. And during a TED event in September, Melinda French Gates called this issue a “public health threat.”

In Melinda’s experience, simply building a toilet does not change sanitation in communities. When a toilet is presented as a “modern, trendy convenience,” popularity in usage increases. She cites one example where an innovative marketing campaign from northern India ties toilets to marriage. “No loo,” one headline read, “No ‘I do.’”

If you are in the DC area, please join the Pulitzer Center on Thursday, October 28 at 7 PM. for a free screening and reception at 1875 Connecticut Ave, NW (corner of T Street). A panel discussion with Lisa Biagiotti, producer of the film and multimedia journalist for PBS and Current TV, Peter Sawyer from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Janie Hayes from PATH will follow the documentary.

You can watch the trailer for the documentary and RSVP for the event at the Pulitzer Center website.

This RainWater Bag could be a lower-cost and practical solution for mainstreaming rainwater harvesting.

This week, thousands of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) experts, and hundreds of members of the media came together in Stockholm for World Water Week to discuss solutions to the world WASH challenge.

David Trouba of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council suggested that “solving the sanitation crisis would be a more momentous accomplishment for humanity than the building of the Great Wall, the Apollo Moon Missions or the construction of the Pyramids.”

At present, the dire fact is that 1.2 billion people have to crap in the open — polluting drinking water and causing diarrheal-disease — while suffering the insecurity and indignity of open defecation. The consensus of the participants is that the world could, should and will solve this problem.

One of the specific outcomes of World Water Week was a statement targeted as a wake-up call for the High Level Plenary Meeting on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that will be held in less than two weeks.

Their request is for leaders across the world to prioritize action to ensure that the MDG for water and sanitation is met. It is becoming more widely acknowledged that not meeting the MDG for WASH will undermine the achievement of other MDGs — particularly the MDG for maternal and child health. “Lack of water and sanitation makes people poor. Inadequate access to water and sanitation deprives billions of people, especially women and girls, of opportunities, dignity, safety and well being,” read the Stockholm Statement.

“Water has definitely not received the place it needs to have in the draft outcome of the summit. Good management of water resources and provision of drinking water and sanitation is a prerequisite for fulfilling all the MDGs,” said Anders Berntell, Executive Director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).

World Water Week also included a capacity-building workshop for developing country journalists so that they can report more effectively about the water and sanitation challenge in their home countries. The 2009-2010 WASH Media Award winners were also announced during the week. Journalists came from as far as Bangladesh, Malawi, Venezuela and Yemen to participate in the workshop.

The issue of WASH in Schools was also a theme of World Water Week. A partnership of more than 25 organizations is urging decision makers across the world to increase investment of WASH in schools. About 50 percent of school-aged children in the developing world are forced to attend a school without safe drinking water, a toilet or soap and a place to wash their hands. This partnership stresses that all children should be able to go to school and all schools should have WASH as a part of a safe, healthy and comfortable environment for learning and growing.

World Water Week is also about how to deliver WASH services effectively and sustainably. It is a practical week as much as it is a visionary and policy-oriented week. Governments, implementing organizations, the private sector and the poor themselves will have to work together to ensure that WASH services get delivered, especially for the ultra-poor and most vulnerable.

This will require thinking outside the box and creating a movement for solving the WASH challenge. Some solutions will be technical such as the RainWater Bag, which could be a lower-cost and practical solution for mainstreaming rainwater harvesting — or ecological sanitation, the process of turning human poop into fertilizer. Could this so-called “humanure” be a new cash crop that provides an income opportunity in extremely poor communities?

Other solutions will be sociological. To overcome the sanitation and hygiene challenge, billions of people will have to change their behavior. But according to the 2,600 participants of World Water Week, this is all doable.

If you are interested in meeting people that were a part of World Water Week, go to http://watercube.tv.

John Sauer works as communications director for Water Advocates in Washington, DC. His work focuses on increasing U.S. support and action for worldwide access to safe, affordable, and sustainable drinking water and adequate sanitation.

If you live in Washington, DC, you’re invited to meet on Capitol Hill for the “Sanitation is Dignity” exhibit with speeches on the crisis & solutions by invited guests. It’s a great opportunity to spotlight a major– and solvable– health crisis. Details below:

WHAT: World Toilet Day event: “Sanitation is Dignity” exhibit and speeches on the crisis & solutions by invited guests

WHEN: Thursday, November 19, 2009, 12:30pm-1:00pm

WHERE: United States Capitol, West Front Grassy Area (north panel); West side of Capitol Building (facing Washington Monument). Near corner of 1st Street NW & Constitution Ave. NW. Take the metro to Union Station

WHO: Senator Durbin (Invited), Representative Blumenauer (Invited), Representative Payne (Invited), Water Advocates, WaterAid, CSIS, Water For People, National Resources Defense Council, Earth Day Network and others

Contact John Sauer at jsauer@wateradvocates.org if you would like to volunteer.

Check out the ad, and find out what you can do to help here.

Excerpts below, full piece here:

With over 2 million people dying of preventable illnesses linked to lack of access to water, sanitation and hygiene every year, it is critical that the response to this crisis be as large as the need. At present this is not the case—the response is abysmally below the need. Let’s take a look.

Annually about $6 billion in development aid goes to water and sanitation programs globally, but $18 billion is the estimated amount required each year to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target for water and sanitation. This is a significant gap that only a coordinated global strategy can address.

The U.S. is not the global leader that it needs to be on this issue. It trails Japan and Germany in development aid to water and sanitation issues, spending only about $432 million in 2007 according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). By contrast, Japan spent $1.9 billion and Germany $593 million.

Efforts have been made to increase U.S. leadership but they have not been successful yet. The most notable push is from Senator Durbin and 24 other senators (a quarter of the Senate) who are hoping to pass legislation (S.624) that aims to reach 100 million people with first-time access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015. Water and sanitation organizations suggest that the U.S. government contribution should be $1.5 billion per year.

Check it out!

-Chris Scott

More than 99,000 Americans have signed an unprecedented petition to the Senate in support of global access to clean water and sanitation. The petition calls for more Senators to join Sen. Durbin and Sen. Corker to sponsor the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2009 (S.624), a landmark bill that would commit the United States to providing 100 million people with first-time, sustainable access to clean water and sanitation by 2015.

The advocacy organization ONE galvanized the campaign with the help of Matt Damon, a clean water champion. “Water is one of the smartest poverty fighting investments we can make,” wrote Damon.

The outpouring of support reveals the growing momentum for solving this global crisis. More journalists, universities, and politicians than ever are beginning to recognize how shameful it is that the United States has not done more on behalf of this preventable issue. And they are acting – louder than in recent memory – to do something about it.

884 million people in the world lack access to safe water, and 2.4 billion people do not even have a proper latrine to dispose of their human waste. This creates a catastrophic burden on women in developing countries (who must walk miles to fetch water), causes 1.6 million children to die of diarrhea yearly and chokes economic growth.

The solutions are known and affordable– but will only be used if there is enough political commitment to funding them. Universal access to water and sanitation is still a pipe dream for many poorer countries, especially nations in Africa. At the current rate the African continent will not even cut in half the proportion of those living without access to sanitation until 2076. This is an international travesty, but the US Government is in a position to kick-start momentum so as to greatly reduce the burden of the international safe drinking water and sanitation crisis.

Already the petition is having an impact. Since the start of the campaign three weeks ago, four Senators have signed on as co-sponsors bringing the total to 10. The petition delivery is scheduled for this week and advocates hope more Senators will sign on. The related bill (H.R.2030) has been introduced in the House by Rep. Blumenauer of Oregon, and has been referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

This bipartisan legislation is critical for the water, sanitation and health community. If the American public and politicians commit to solving the water and sanitation crisis, the Millennium Development Goals would be closer to being reached and a push can be made for universal access to water and sanitation—the ultimate goal.

The legislation builds off of the ground-breaking Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005, which made addressing the water and sanitation challenge a priority of US international development policy.

We all saw how public support for AIDS was a catalyst for life-saving action. Now the same might be done for water and sanitation.

-John Sauer and Katryn Bowe, Water Advocates

The WaterAid report “Fatal Neglect” reveals that diarrhea prevention and treatment programs are woefully under-funded when compared to programs for HIV/AIDS and malaria. For example, HIV/AIDS receives over $10 billion a year in global health financing, while diarrhea receives well under $2 billion. These funding levels grossly misrepresent the disease burden as both these diseases are responsible for roughly the same death toll. However, the WaterAid report also makes very clear that adequately addressing diarrheal diseases should not come at the expense of funding needed for tackling other diseases.

The PATH report “Solutions to Defeat a Global Killer” highlights that during the 1980s and 1990s incredible progress was made through a variety of interventions in preventing and treating deaths from diarrheal dehydration but the momentum ceased when the issue fell off the radar in the 2000s.

The report states:

Extraordinary improvements were made in access to safe drinking water and sanitation. In total, development efforts during the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981 to 1990) and the following decade (1991 to 2000) provided water to more than 2 billion people and sanitation to more than 1.5 billion.

A 2008 research study conducted by PATH to evaluate the global health funding and policy landscape found that diarrheal disease ranked last among a list of other global health issues.

Fortunately, two recent initiatives in Congress give some hope that political attention is shifting back to diarrhea and other sicknesses that inadequate water and sanitation trigger.

New bipartisan legislation called “The Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2009″–if passed–would be one way to increase the financing to stop fatal diarrhea and to put progress back on track. The Act would commit the U.S. government to extending safe, affordable and sustainable supplies of water and sanitation to 100 million people by 2015.

This Act–building on earlier landmark legislation (The Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005)–could ratchet up interventions such as building latrines, promoting handwashing with soap, constructing water wells and providing point of use water treatment, all of which reduce fatal diarrhea.

Another bipartisan Act, “The Newborn, Child and Mother Survival Act of 2009” would also have an impact on eradicating fatal diarrhea if it were signed into law. Appropriations for this Act would fund both prevention (water and sanitation programs) and treatment (oral reyhdration therapy and zinc tablets).

Together these two pieces of legislation are an incredible opportunity for the U.S. government to take a leadership role in addressing the imbalance in priority and funding that the WaterAid and PATH reports uncover. A “Call to Action” that PATH organized has been signed so far by 80 groups from the health, corporate, environmental and water and sanitation sectors. They represent the breadth of support that is needed to push these two pieces of legislation through Congress and get them signed into law by President Obama.

-John Sauer, Water Advocates

Alluring as this image may be, what it truly portrays is the economic, physical and health burden that women and girls must endure everyday of their lives to provide water for their families – this is the forgotten glass ceiling.

Whether a woman lives in Africa, South America or Asia, one of her primary tasks is to gather water for her family. There is no convenience of indoor plumbing for these women. Compare the trek you make to your bathroom or kitchen for a glass of water to the journey women in the developing world must make—3 miles a day on average—to fetch dirty water from mainly contaminated sources, such as rivers, unprotected springs and shallow wells. All this fetching for water uses up 40 billion hours annually of women’s time worldwide. It could be more productively spent on income-generating activities, education and caring for their families.

The quality of the water women gather greatly impacts their and their families’ health. Water from unsafe sources is contaminated with pathogens that cause debilitating and deadly water-borne diseases (such as cholera, typhoid and amoebic dysentery). Diarrheal diseases such as these kill more children under 5 than AIDS, Malaria and TB combined. Only with safe and accessible water will women and their families have a chance to live and to lead productive lives.

The incongruity of this situation is that we know how to relieve women of this burden. Industrialized countries eradicated most water-borne diseases 100 years ago by distributing chlorinated treated water through piped distribution systems and treating sewage before it reaches our public water sources. That is why you don’t think about contracting typhoid when you brush your teeth in the morning.

While these large infrastructure-based systems may not be the answer for all of the developing world, there are many small-scale doable solutions that provide safe and sustainable water and sanitation. Even providing simple pit latrines, household water treatment and educating people on proper hand-washing can help stop the contamination of water sources and reduce the cases of diarrheal diseases significantly.

For example, in Bangladesh, WaterPartners International worked with Ms. Rasheda Khatun, age 28, to provide her community a new pit latrine with bamboo lining. This intervention has stopped the use of hanging latrines (a basic latrine constructed over a river or stream) and defecating out in the open. Hygienic latrines help prevent the spread of disease.

Throughout the developing world girls often drop out of school when they reach puberty because they don’t have a separate place to go to the toilet. UNICEF’s efforts in Malawi allowed Eveless to go back to school again when they installed a water borehole and separate toilets for girls and boys. Two years before she had dropped out of school and feared she would never realize her dream to become a nurse. In Guatemala, Water For People and the Global Water Challenge are helping to provide Magdalena’s school with safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene education. In Cambodia RDIC works with teachers who act as sales people and marketers to sell ceramic water filters, which have reduced diarrheal disease amongst users by 46%.

Other non-governmental organizations such as Action Against Hunger, Africare and CARE work all over the developing world to help women get the safe drinking water they and their families deserve.

So let’s start thinking of that iconic image of a woman carrying water on her head as the BEFORE picture and let’s try to achieve the AFTER picture—healthy women with access to safe drinking water for them and their families and girls in school.

If people across the United States joined together to support water and sanitation projects they could immediately help woman shatter the most basic of glass ceilings—access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

-Andra Tamburro and John Sauer, Water Advocates.
[Photo credit: John Kayser]

—Margaret McDonnell, ONE

This past month, just before World Water Day, the water and sanitation community tragically lost Mickey Sampson, age 43, of RDI Cambodia. Mickey’s life is a portrait of success that should be recognized internationally. Through his leadership, RDI Cambodia became one of Southeast Asia’s most innovative water and sanitation organizations. It provides an array of interventions that have impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians.

Mickey’s philosophy was not to hand out help to Cambodians but rather to use education, incentives and social marketing to foster genuine demand for water and sanitation products. RDI Cambodia’s successes include a world-renowned ceramic water filter factory which in 2009 will provide an additional 30,000 families with safe drinking water. Mickey and his team also produced the nation’s most popular children’s television program which entertainingly teaches about water and health, including arsenic poisoning. RDI Cambodia also reaches adults with these messages through popular karaoke videos, as was highlighted by NPR and National Geographic News. Ecosan toilets, rainwater harvesting and rope pumps were other successful ways he met the country’s water needs.

Another impressive achievement was the establishment of a laboratory which tests water quality. It is the most active laboratory in Cambodia for arsenic testing. Over 10,500 wells have been tested. Mickey was constantly upgrading the laboratory and working tirelessly to get new equipment donated so that Cambodians would have safer water to drink.

Both the ceramic water filters and rope pump projects have been studied by third parties and the results show high levels of sustainability, an indication that RDI Cambodia’s approach is replicable.

Mickey, a native of Louisville, KY, was a good friend of Water Advocates and we were grateful to have known him. Thankfully, the work that Mickey started continues through the organization he founded, RDI Cambodia. He is an inspiration to many in the water and sanitation field.

Our hearts go out to Mickey’s wife, family and co-workers during this difficult time.

Learn more about RDI Cambodia’s work here:

Ceramic Water Filter Factory

Laboratory

-John Sauer, Water Advocates