Over 2.5 million people worldwide do not have toilets

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Toilets
Toilets

The entrenched practice of open defecation?among millions around the world continues to put children and their communities at risk, UNICEF warned on World Toilet Day yesterday.

Toilets
Toilets

Some picketing, and among them, 1 billion defecate in the open 2.5 million people worldwide do not have toilets?? in fields, bushes, or bodies of water ? putting them, and especially children, in danger of deadly faecal-oral diseases like diarrhoea.

In 2013, more than 340,000 children under five died from diarrhoeal diseases due to a lack of safe water, sanitation and basic hygiene ? an average of almost 1,000 deaths per day.

Eighty-two percent of the one billion people practising open defecation live in just 10 countries: India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Niger, Nepal, China, and Mozambique.

The number of people practising open defecation is still rising in 26 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, though they have declined in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

In Nigeria, the number of open defecators increased from 23 million in 1990 to 39 million in 2012.

Globally, some 1.9 billion people have gained access to improved sanitation since 1990. However, progress has not kept up with population growth and the Millennium Development Goal target on sanitation is unlikely to be reached by 2015 at current rates of progress.

?Lack of sanitation is a reliable marker of how the poorest in a country are faring,? Sanjay Wijesekera, Head of UNICEF?s Global Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programmes said.

?But although it is the poor who overwhelmingly do not have toilets, everyone suffers from the contaminating effects of open defecation, so everyone should have a sense of urgency about addressing this problem,? he added.

The call to end the practice of open defecation is being made with growing insistence as the links with childhood stunting become clearer.

?The challenge of open defecation is one of both equity and dignity, and very often of safety as well, particularly for women and girls,? Sanjay Wijesekera noted.

?They have to wait until dark to relieve themselves, putting them in danger of attack, and worse, as we have seen recently.?

UNICEF?s?Community Approaches to Total Sanitation?addresses the problem at the local level by involving communities in devising solutions, and has led to some 26 million people across more than 50 countries abandoning the practice of open defecation since 2008.

Jamila Akweley Okertchiri

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