World Toilet Day: What would you do without a loo? 19 November
is World Toilet Day, a day to raise awareness of the global
sanitation situation and to celebrate something many of us take
for granted: a toilet. The Sanitation Challenge Imagine what it
would be like without a toilet - the inconvenience, the
embarrassment, and the effects on our health of not disposing of
our ‘shit' safely. More than a third of the global population
are faced with exactly this situation. An estimated 2.5 billion
people do not currently have access to a safe, private and
hygienic toilet and the wide-spread practice of open defecation
results in a lot of disease and death in the developing world.
According to the World Toilet Organisations, 1.8 million people,
90 per cent of whom are children under the age of five, die from
fecally-transmitted diseases every year. Moreover, diarrhoea in
children under the age of two can have irreversible debilitating
effects such as stunted growth. This is why IDS co-organised a
workshop for almos