24
HEALTH AND SANITATION
"It seems
that building
toilets for
populations
that do not
have them is
the easy part
— getting
them to use
them is much
harder."
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trachoma. According to UNICEF, diarrhoea caused by
these diseases is the leading killer of children younger
than five. Additionally, once a child is a victim of one
of the diseases passed on due to the lack of proper
sanitation and hygiene, they begin to lose a lot of
fluids and lack of appetite for food. As a result, open
defecation can also be linked to cases of malnutrition
in children.
Currently, there are two major movements designed at
helping WHO to reach their crucial goals.
Since 2011, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation
has been seeking an innovative, radical, new design
for the toilet, with the intention that this toilet would
be capable of being installed without plumbing,
would use the waste to some sort of advantage to
the toilet’s owner, and would solve the challenge now
defined by WHO.
Between 6 and 8 November last year, this drive
reached a new level when the foundation hosted
the first Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing. According
to the press release, “The expo featured product
announcements and funding commitments aimed
at accelerating the adoption of innovative, pro-poor
sanitation technologies in developing regions around
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the world. Each are first-in-class products designed
to kill pathogens that make people sick and transform
human waste into valuable resources at a low cost to
users — all without connections to water supply or
sewer systems.”
After nearly eight years of constant competition and
research, several of these reinvented toilets are
currently being tested in Durban, which Bill Gates
described as being “a good place to run these tests
because the city is growing fast and many people there
don’t have modern sanitation, which means that even
if they have access to a toilet, waste can get into the
environment and make people sick.”
Meanwhile, the NGO Practical Action is looking to
implement quick, simple actions that can make a
difference immediately in the sanitation space. Their
main tool in the fight is the old-fashioned pit latrine,
which the organisation believes is “cheap to build, easy
to understand and maintain, has no running costs,
maintenance is very simple, does not need water to
operate, and controls flies and smells.” Ideally, they
would prefer to build bio-latrines, which also do not
need water and produce organic manure, but they
are more expensive. “The toilet blocks can also house
showers, and methane gas can be used for cooking
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September 2019 Volume 25 I Number 7