Bangladesh stops open defecation in just over a decade

In Bangladesh, village water, sanitation and hygiene committees have an active core of women to contribute to community decisions

Answering nature’s call was once a nightmare for Rashida Begum, who had to creep around the jungle for a suitably private spot. Her home had no toilet, like thousands of others in her crowded cluster of farming villages outside the capital. In just over a decade, that’s all changed, in her neighborhood and many others.

Through a dogged campaign to build toilets and educate Bangladeshis about the dangers of open defecation, the densely populated South Asian nation has managed to reduce the number of people who defecate in the open to just 1 per cent of the 166 million population, according to the government — down from 42 percent in 2003.

“Once it was our habit to go to the fields or jungles. Now, it is shameful to us,” Begum said in Bormi, a cluster of poor farming villages just outside Dhaka, the capital. “Even our children do not defecate openly anymore. We do not need to ask them; they do it on their own.”

Bangladesh’s success in sanitation — something so far unattained by its wealthier neighbor to the west, India — came from a campaign supported by 25 per cent of the country’s overall development budget.

“The government has made a huge commitment,” said Akramul Islam, director of water, sanitation and hygiene for BRAC, an international development association. “The government decided that funds should go to the extreme poor who do not have latrines. So that basically gives a big push from the public sector for spending on sanitation.”

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The government’s engineers partnered with village councils and charities to spread the message on how toilets are key to better health. Rising incomes — moving from an average of $1,154 in 2012-13 to $1,314 in the past fiscal year, according to the World Bank — also helped to drive demand, Islam said.

Activists say small-scale surveys show the campaign has improved public health, though there are not yet any government statistics to prove it more broadly.

“We see clearly that there is a decline in waterborne diseases and diarrheal diseases, so there is a clear link there,” Islam said, while acknowledging that the improvement was something “we have to study.”

Begum said her children have had no stomach illnesses since she installed an in-house toilet.

Open defecation is considered a major public health menace, causing childhood diarrhea, parasitic worm infections and other scourges that contribute to childhood stunting, malnutrition and tens of billions of dollars in lost productivity every year. Diarrheal diseases kill 700,000 children every year in India alone — most of which could have been prevented with better sanitation.

India has spent about $3 billion since 1986 on campaigning and sanitation programs but has not come close to Bangladesh’s success. Two-thirds of India’s 1.25 billion people still use the great outdoors as their public latrine. About half of Nepal’s 30 million people and about 20 percent of Pakistan’s 182 million also do not have facilities at home.

Bangladesh’s sanitation victory didn’t come easy. Millions of dollars from the government and charities were spent, and campaign volunteers said they worked hard to change public attitudes and habits.

“We had to do fierce campaigning,” said Mohammed Badal Sarker, chairman of a local village council. “We provided schoolchildren with whistles to alert the villagers. It worked like magic.”

Children were encouraged to shout slogans like “Defecating in the open is the enemy of the people” and “No one will marry your daughter if you do not have a toilet at home.”

There is still cause for concern. Bangladesh’s overpopulated urban areas are proving to be more of a challenge, mostly because the opportunity for contaminating the water supply is much greater.

“People might be using a toilet or a latrine, but then where does the human waste go from there?” said John Sauer, senior technical adviser of the Washington-based Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Population Services International.

Waste water could be dumped on a field where children play or where food is grown, he said: “We must address where the human waste goes and how it is treated, disposed or reused.”

SOURCE DAILY RECORD