By AA Correspondents
AFRICAN CAPITALS
As activists mark World Toilet Day with stepped up efforts to raise awareness about those who lack access to toilets, millions of people across Africa continue to defecate in the open.
"Only 15 percent of Ghana's population has access to improved latrines," Demedeme Naa, acting director for environmental health and sanitation at Ghana's Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, told The Anadolu Agency.
"What this means is that 20 percent of the households practice open defecation and 30 percent use shared latrines," he said.
Ghana has a population of nearly 25 million.
"Shared latrines, which include public latrines and latrines in compound houses, are not hygienic," said the official. "In such situations, hygiene is compromised."
He believes the country will not be able to achieve earlier targets that aim to see 54 percent of the population with access to improved latrines by 2015.
"We have set ourselves targets and we think that even though we will not achieve the MDG [UN Millennium Development Goals] targets, we hope to make some modest progress to about 25 percent," said Naa.
He hopes the government will be able to provide about 20,000 household facilities by 2015 under the National Urban Renewal Program.
World Toilet Day is celebrated on November 19 of every year. Activists use the event to raise awareness about people who do not have access to toilets.
UNICEF estimates that some 2.5 billion people worldwide do not have adequate toilets, including 1 billion who defecate in the open.
- Flying toilets-
In Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, as many as 119 million people do not have access to toilets.
"Here in Nigeria, about 119 million people are not using safe toilets, which include 50 million people defecating in the open," UNICEF said in a statement issued in Abuja on Wednesday.
"Nigeria is among the top five countries in the world with a high population practicing open defecation – and the number of open defecators has been on the increase since 1990," it added.
Until last year, 37 million Nigerians were said to be defecating in the open.
UNICEF said slow progress on sanitation and the entrenched practice of open defecation continued to put children and their communities at risk.
"A recent epidemiology report from the Federal Ministry of Health reported 34,825 cases of cholera, as against 2,882 cases over the same period in 2013," it noted.
"Every year, over 150,000 Nigerian children die from diarrhea alone, largely caused by unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene practices," the UN body said.
Linus Awite, permanent secretary at the Health Ministry, told AA that the government had stepped up its campaigns to improve access to decent toilets.
He said the government was taking measures, including proposed legislation banning open defecation.
The Nigerian government has voiced a commitment to end open defecation by 2025.
In Zambia, a landlocked country in southern Africa, nearly half of the estimated population of 15 million lacks access to toilets.
"Eight million people do not have a basic toilet to use in Zambia," Fatoumata Haidra, Zambia country representative for WaterAid, an international NGO, told AA.
She estimates that over half the children in Zambia lack access to basic toilets, "which harms the health of children and often leaves a lifetime legacy of disease and poverty."
Haidra noted that 78,000 children had died since 2000 due to the lack of toilets.
Zambia Central Statistical Office Director John Kalumbi estimates that over 25 percent of those in high-density urban settlements and low-income areas across the country lack proper toilet facilities.
"People find it more convenient to use plastic bags, especially at night, because some toilets are far away from the house," Kalumbi told AA.
Kalumbi complained that in some places a lack of space and poor soil made it difficult to construct latrines.
"The overused, existing latrines attract vermin and in the rainy season, overflowing sewage pollutes wells, causing waterborne diseases, like diarrhea, dysentery and cholera," he said.
Similarly, nearly six million people in the East African nation of Kenya have no direct access to toilets.
"They are forced to defecate in the open – not only in the slums, but also in rural areas," Carol Sherman, Kenya country director for Plan International, a global development organization, told AA.
"The slums in Kenya are crowded with so many people and they have no sewers or water system," she lamented.
Millions of Kenyans use what is commonly known as "flying toilets," disposable bags in which people defecate before discarding.
"What they do is defecate in a paper bag and then slingshot the bag into the air so that it lands far away – often in someone's house," said Sherman. "There have been cases of people being hit by flying toilets."
Her organization is working with the Kenyan health authorities to change this kind of behavior.
"We are teaching locals to build simple latrines and stop such things from flying around," Sherman told AA. "We have helped 482 villages acquire 'open defection-free' status."
In South Africa, the government faces a backlog of 2.4 million households without adequate sanitation.
Of these, some 282,000 households still rely on a bucket sanitation system, which consists of a bucket placed under a toilet seat that is then periodically emptied by the municipality.
Since the Bucket Eradication Program began in September 2013, the Department of Water and Sanitation has managed to eliminate 14,386 bucket-latrines countrywide.
The government hopes to entirely eradicate the bucket system during the 2015/16 financial year.
In the West African country of Sierra Leone, NGOs estimate that about 40 percent of the nearly six-million-strong population lacks access to safe water while 87 percent don't have access to toilets.
For example, in Kroo Bay, a big slum area in capital Freetown, about 3,000 residents rely on only two toilets.
In neighboring Liberia, it is estimated that 83 percent of the 3.5-million-strong population don't have access to toilets.
Since 2000, the country has recorded a total of 17,800 deaths among children from diarrhea and waterborne diseases resulting from the lack of toilets.
In South Sudan, a 2010 household survey showed only 7.4 percent of the population use improved sanitary facilities, compared to 64 percent who defecate in the open.
Some 28.6 percent of the population, meanwhile, uses poor and unhealthy toilet facilities.
"We are doing health promotion and education by creating awareness among the population regarding sanitation and hygiene practices," John Rumunu, director of preventive health at South Sudan's Health Ministry, told AA.
Meanwhile, poverty is the key challenge in Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries, where almost half the population lives under the poverty line.
"Most locals cannot afford toilets," said Twitty Munkhondia of Plan Malawi, an international NGO that runs a number of water, sanitation and hygiene programs.
"Up to about 8 percent of the country's population still defecates in the open – a practice the government would like eliminated by 2015," she told AA.
The government is trying to promote "sanitation marketing" as one way to reduce the number of people living without toilets.
It hopes the local private sector will play a key role producing and providing affordable sanitation products and services, especially toilets.
"There is a need to scale up sanitation marketing to encourage people to move away from open defecation and help change their behavior regarding sanitation," said Munkhondia.
She says sanitation and hygiene awareness must reach the youth and future generations in order to change prevailing mindsets.
"It is anticipated that by 2015, the program will have reached 3,600 villages, 60 markets and 274 schools, translating into about 1.06 million people," Munkhondia said.
Reporting by Rafiu Ajakaye in Nigeria; Umaru Sanda Amadu in Ghana; Francis Maingaila in Zambia; Magdalene Mukami in Kenya; Okech Francis in South Sudan; Hassan Isilow in South Africa; Cinnatus Dumbuya in Sierra Leone; Evelyn T. Kpadeh in Liberia; and Moses Michael-Phiri in Malawi
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