A holiday flush with need: World Toilet Day op-ed

Palo Alto, CA (CNN) -- It does not make for pleasant dinner conversation. But we have a global sanitation crisis. More than 40% of the world's population does not have access to a toilet. These 2.6 billion people, most living in low- and middle-income countries in Asia and Africa, face the daily challenge of finding a bush, train track or empty lot where they can urinate and defecate in relative privacy.

Between 1990 and 2008, the share of the world's population that had access to basic sanitation increased only 7%, to 61% of the world's citizens. In many developing countries, mobile phone penetration is expanding at a faster rate than sanitation. In Tanzania, for example, half the country's citizens have mobile phones, but only 24% use an improved sanitation facility.

Saturday marks the 10th anniversary of World Toilet Day, a day set aside not simply as a celebration of this most venerable and useful of technologies, but as a way to draw attention to the crisis and some possible solutions.

This sanitation crisis is not only an affront to dignity. It results in the release of hundreds of tons of feces and urine each day directly into rivers, lakes, landfills and oceans, creating an immense human and environmental health hazard. Every day more than 4,000 young children die from sanitation-related illness. Fully half of the hospital beds in the developing world are occupied by people whose ailments can be traced to poor sanitation.

Full story: www.cnn.com/2011/11/19/opinion/davis-toilet-day/index.html?hpt=op_t1

New paper from the group on urban water resale

Water supply services for Africa's urban poor: the role of resale

Valentina Zuin, Leonard Ortolano, Manuel Alvarinho, Kory Russel, Anne Thebo, Odete Muximpua and Jennifer Davis

Journal of Water and Health Vol 9 No 4 pp 773–784 © IWA Publishing 2011 doi:10.2166/wh.2011.031

ABSTRACT: In sub-Saharan Africa only 35% of the urban population has access to a piped water connection on their premises. The majority of households obtain water from public standpipes or from neighbors who are connected to the municipal network. Water resale is often prohibited, however, because of concerns about affordability and risks to public health. Using data collected from 1,377 households in Maputo, Mozambique, we compare the microbiological quality, as well as the time and money costs of water supply from individual house connections, public standpipes, and water obtained from neighbors. Households with their own water connections have better service across virtually all indicators measured, and express greater satisfaction with their service, as compared with those using other water sources. Households purchasing water from their neighbors pay lower time and money costs per liter of water, on average, as compared with those using standpipes. Resale competes favorably with standpipes along a number of service quality dimensions; however, after controlling for water supply characteristics, households purchasing water from neighbors are significantly less likely to be satisfied with their water service as compared with those using standpipes.

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