2008: International Year of Sanitation

2008 is the International Year of Sanitation. You can find resources, information and news on forthcoming events on the dedicated website.

From the ODI blog last year (better late than never):

What, a year talking about ... toilets?!?

In Europe, we take for granted a toilet on the premises, at home and work. In the developing world, however, almost one in two people doesn’t have one. Imagine having to go to your local park, or the nearest unoccupied land, to defecate. Here it is dog waste we put in plastic bags, but in densely-populated cities in Africa, plastic bags serve for human faeces, the famous flying toilets – that’s ‘flying’ as in thrown away, casually disposed of, by the user. No means of safe disposal are provided.

The ‘IYS’ is designed to put a spotlight on current poor conditions of hygiene in many places in developing countries - to highlight the little progress made to-date towards the Sanitation target under the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 7), and to advocate for the multiple benefits that stem from better sanitation and hygiene.

For me, personally, visiting the Democratic Republic of Congo last year was an unforgettable experience. The rates of access to sanitation in DRC are thought (according to the best available information) to be 8% and 10% in urban and rural areas respectively, i.e. only 1 in 10 Congolese has access to a toilet (of the terrestrial, non-flying kind, that is). Imagine what conditions are like in the slums of DRC. As to solid waste disposal, in the course of the research we carried out with our partners (Tearfund and the Programme de Promotion des Soins de Santé Primaires en Zones de Santé Rurales (PPSSP)), we discovered that, in the capital of DRC, Kinshasa, a city with an estimated population of 6-7 million people (there hasn’t been a census for many years), the public sanitation authority possesses one sole functioning rubbish lorry.

Read more at the ODI blog website.

Robert Fraser at the Federation has flagged up this opinion piece in the New York Times:

Last year... as the United States spent almost $3 billion on AIDS programs in Africa, it invested only about $30 million in traditional safe-water projects. This nearly 100-to-1 imbalance is disastrously inequitable — especially considering that in Africa H.I.V. tends to be most prevalent in the relatively wealthiest and most developed countries. Most African nations have stable adult H.I.V. rates of 3 percent or less.

Many millions of African children and adults die of malnutrition, pneumonia, motor vehicle accidents and other largely preventable, if not headline-grabbing, conditions. One-fifth of all global deaths from diarrhea occur in just three African countries — Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria — that have relatively low H.I.V. prevalence. Yet this condition, which is not particularly difficult to cure or prevent, gets scant attention from the donors that invest nearly $1 billion annually on AIDS programs in those countries.

Read more on the NYT website.