This year’s World Toilet Day (19 November 2011) was its tenth anniversary, however there are still 2.6 billion people without proper sanitation – including 1.2 billion who have no facilities at all and are forced to engage in the hazardous and demeaning practices of open defecation.
Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of poor sanitation — that’s 1.5 million preventable deaths each year globally. According to statistics, every year, around 60 million children in the developing world are born into households without access to sanitation.
“In Africa the sanitation challenge continues to grow. Many countries in the continent, particularly in the Eastern Southern Africa, may not achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for sanitation, especially not in rural and peri-urban areas where the poor live,” said Amsalu Negussie, Regional Water and Sanitation Advisor for Plan International in Eastern and Southern Africa.
“The approaches by different development agencies to improve household sanitation used to focus on provision of latrines and subsidizing the cost to help poor people access sanitation facilities. However, these approaches could not address the real issues and didn’t achieve the intended results for more than 3 decades; there was no significant increase in sanitation coverage around the globe,” he added.
Plan’s goal is to ensure that children and youth realise their right to safe, reliable and affordable drinking water supplies and hygienic sanitation as this is vital for their survival.
Plan believes that the best solutions often come from the communities themselves. The children’s charity encourages families to come together to talk about the risks and work out action plans for change.
Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) focuses on igniting a change in sanitation behaviour rather than constructing toilets. It does this through a social development that is encouraged by facilitators from within or outside the community. The approach concentrates on individual behavior change for community action.
Children can make significant contribution by persuading parents to build latrines as well as educate their neighbours in the communities. Through its CLTS programme, Plan’s School-Led Total Sanitation approach involves teachers as community facilitators in the promotion of hygiene and sanitation. Students play active roles by initiating families to go to triggering sites and report developments after communities are triggered. They also educate villagers about latrine construction during community meetings.
A group of young people in Ethiopia uses songs and poems in the communities to educate people about sanitation.
“Stop mentioning children as an excuse when you find shit in the open, around houses. We will not defecate in the open. As children we can play apart in making our environment clean,” the students say in one of their songs