Sanitation drive awaits launch

South Asia’s sanitation campaigners will brainstorm in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, on Monday to launch a year-long campaign the next day to make the policymakers to live up to their sanitation promises for the sake of public health.

Developing and agreeing on a ‘citizens’ charter’ on the right to sanitation and issuing a statement for urgent action will be on the agenda before the formal launch of the campaign that aims to increase ‘political priority’ of sanitation.

Civil society representatives, NGOs and parliamentarians from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, who gathered in Kathmandu for the launch, will be the part of the campaigning alliance in their respective countries.

The campaign is going to be launched at a time when the counties are calculating their progresses towards the UN-set Millennium Development Goals as those targets-achieving deadlines will expire and new ones will be set in 2015.

“We don’t see any shortage of high-level political commitments, but we don’t see overall progress,” said Mustafa Talpur, South Asia Regional Advocacy Manager of WaterAid, which united all the parties for the campaign.

He told bdnews24.com that the campaign was ‘critical’ for the South Asia as regionally world’s highest number of people, nearly 700 million, defecate in open spaces here.

He said there was also ‘a huge disparity’ between the urban and rural areas.

But the governments of the region had made promises ‘locally, nationally, regionally and globally’ to deliver sanitation to the poorest communities.

China, India and Pakistan together account for half of the global deaths due to diarrhoea which is a major cause of under-five deaths in Asia.

It is estimated that $1 spending on sanitation can return $ 4 to a country, apart from reducing unwanted deaths.

“We’ll urge the governments to ensure this (sanitation) right with a focus on the poorest and look beyond 2015 for sanitation for all,” Talpur said.

The campaign will also call upon the governments to spend at least 1 percent of the GDP, or an adequate percentage of the national budget, on sanitisation to achieve universal coverage of sanitation and hygiene.

It will urge the donors to double their allocations to the sanitation and hygiene sector in South Asia, focusing on countries which are lagging behind others.

“Lack of proper sanitation means people will fall ill and lose their productivity. Many girls in their adolescence don’t go to schools during menstrual bleeding as toilets are not sanitised,” Partha Hefaz Shaikh, a WaterAid Director in Bangladesh, told bdnews24.com.

According to a report on Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation by the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, more attention is needed to meet the MDG target on sanitation for Bangladesh where 56 percent people use improved latrines which are properly hygienic.

Though only 4 percent people defecate in open spaces in Bangladesh, the number of shared latrines, which are considered unhygienic, is very high.

Respiratory tract infections, pneumonia and diarrhoea are the major under-five killers in Bangladesh.

“But our government made all the commitments at high-level to improve sanitation,” Shaikh said adding that “when it comes to budget allocation, sanitation comes at the bottom of the priority.”

“It’s a big question for us. Why?”

WHO says Bangladesh spends only 0.4 percent of its GDP on sanitation and drinking water while World Bank estimates economic loss worth $ 4.22 billion or 6.3 percent of the GDP due to inadequate sanitation.