Monday, May 12, 2008

Sanitation Reaches the End of the Beginning (Perhaps)

‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ So said Winston Churchill at a turning point in one of humanity's darkest hours, the Second World War. In the midst of this International Year of Sanitation, and while CSD-16 follows up on the implementation of decisions on water and sanitation from CSD-13, it could be said that we have reached the end of the beginning in our efforts to eradicate the global sanitation crisis.

By: Jon Lane, Executive Director, Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council

The numbers are well known: about 2.6 billion people lack sanitation. Of these roughly 0.7 billion are in India, 0.7 billion in China, 0.7 billion in Africa and the reminder in other places. Progress in sanitation services is struggling to keep up with population growth, and Africa is lagging most. The largest numbers of unserved people live in rural areas but the urban population is growing rapidly.

Positive signs

Overall this doesn't sound good but some trends point to hopeful and positive signs, such as the recognition of sanitation as distinct from water and hence as an important subject in its own right. Thus, the CSD's review of sanitation is appropriate because we live in a dysfunctional world consisting of two halves: half have good sanitation while half don't even have basic sanitation. The latter is shocking and illogical since we know that access to basic sanitation improves health, generates economic development, promotes social development and helps the environment.

For the CSD's delegates, there are plenty of positive links between sanitation policy and fieldwork of which to take note, particularly in the three places with the most people lacking sanitation.

In China the government is improving sanitation in the inland rural West to reduce migration to the big cities of the East; farmers are moving from using fresh human shit as fertiliser to composting it first; biogas generation from human shit is spreading widely.

In India the government has moved its emphasis from implementing to enabling others to do so; Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is evolving from a shame-based to output-based concept; there are plenty of good innovations coming from civil society.

In Africa, ministers across the continent are starting to take responsibility for sanitation, to allocate budgets for it, and to develop national sanitation policies; there are many good sanitation projects in different countries and increasing connections between them.

Achieving global sanitation coverage

Nonetheless, given the huge gaps in global sanitation coverage there is clearly a big task ahead of us to achieve sanitation for everybody. But it can be achieved through hard work, plain talk, strong leadership and demand creation.

Hard work: doing sanitation well is difficult, combining social sciences and technical work. It is slow steady work, house by house, community by community. There is no substitute for hard work.

Plain talk: we must speak out about the subject using plain language that everybody can understand. This will bring sanitation and toilets and shit into regular professional and policy dialogue.

Strong leadership: this is being demonstrated for example by the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation chaired by HRH Prince Willem-Alexander of The Netherlands. Another example is the 32 Ministers from countries across Africa who gathered recently at the AfricaSan conference and made strong political commitments.

All told, the sums of the above parts add up to a great forward momentum on sanitation. Were he alive today, Winston Churchill might even dare to agree.

Jon Lane is Executive Director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), which has made a strategic decision to concentrate its efforts on sanitation and hygiene and recently launched the Global Sanitation Fund.