Marisol and Misael Menjívar pose next to the biodigester installed in March in the backyard of their home in El Corozal, a rural settlement located near Suchitoto in central El Salvador. With a biotoilet and stove, the couple produces biogas for cooking from feces, which saves them money. The biotoilet can be seen in the background. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SUCHITOTO, El Salvador , Jul 25 2023 (IPS)

A new technology that has arrived in rural villages in El Salvador makes it possible for small farming families to generate biogas with their feces and use it for cooking – something that at first sounded to them like science fiction and also a bit smelly.

In the countryside, composting latrines, which separate urine from feces to produce organic fertilizer, are very popular. But can they really produce gas for cooking?

“It seemed incredible to me,” Marisol Menjívar told IPS as she explained how her biodigester, which is part of a system that includes a toilet and a stove, was installed in the backyard of her house in the village of El Corozal, near Suchitoto, a municipality in the central Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán."When the first ones were installed here, I was excited to see that they had stoves hooked up, and I asked if I could have one too." -- Marisol Menjívar

“When the first ones were installed here, I was excited to see that they had stoves hooked up, and I asked if I could have one too,” added Marisol, 48. Hers was installed in March.

El Corozal, population 200, is one of eight rural settlements that make up the Laura López Rural Water and Sanitation Association (Arall), a community organization responsible for providing water to 465 local families.

The families in the small villages, who are dedicated to the cultivation of corn and beans, had to flee the region during the country’s 1980-1992 civil war, due to the fighting.

After the armed conflict, they returned to rebuild their lives and work collectively to provide basic services, especially drinking water, as have many other community organizations, in the absence of government coverage.

In this Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants, 78.4 percent of rural households have access to piped water, while 10.8 percent are supplied by wells and 10.7 percent by other means.

With small stoves like this one, a score of families in El Corozal in central El Salvador cook their food with biogas they produce themselves, thanks to a government program that has brought clean energy technology to these remote rural villages. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Simple green technology

The biodigester program in rural areas is being promoted by the Salvadoran Water Authority (Asa).

Since November 2022, the government agency has installed around 500 of these systems free of charge in several villages around the country.

The aim is to enable small farmers to produce sustainable energy, biogas at no cost, which boosts their income and living standards, while at the same time improving the environment.

The program provides each family with a kit that includes a biodigester, a biotoilet, and a small one-burner stove.

In El Corozal, five of these kits were installed by Asa in November 2022, to see if people would accept them or not. To date, 21 have been delivered, and there is a waiting list for more.

In El Corozal, a rural settlement in the municipality of Suchitoto in central El Salvador, the technology of family biodigesters arrived at the end of last year, and some families are now producing biogas to light up their stoves and cook their food at no cost. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

“With the first ones were set up, the idea was for people to see how they worked, because there was a lot of ignorance and even fear,” Arall’s president, Enrique Menjívar, told IPS.

In El Corozal there are many families with the surname Menjívar, because of the tradition of close relatives putting down roots in the same place.

“Here we’re almost all related,” Enrique added.

The biodigester is a hermetically sealed polyethylene bag, 2.10 meters long, 1.15 meters wide and 1.30 meters high, inside which bacteria decompose feces or other organic materials.

This process generates biogas, clean energy that is used to fuel the stoves.

The toilets are mounted on a one-meter-high cement slab in latrines in the backyard. They are made of porcelain and have a handle on one side that opens and closes the stool inlet hole.

One of the main advantages that family biodigesters have brought to the inhabitants of El Corozal, a small village in the Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán, is that the whole process begins with clean, hygienic toilets, like this one set up in Marleni Menjívar’s backyard, as opposed to the older dry composting latrines, which drew flies and cockroaches. To the left of the toilet is the small handle used to pump water to flush the feces into the biodigester. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

They also have a small hand pump, similar to the ones used to inflate bicycle tires, and when the handle is pushed, water is pumped from a bucket to flush the waste down the pipe.

The underground pipe carries the biomass by gravity to the biodigester, located about five meters away.

The system can also be fed with organic waste, by means of a tube with a hole at one end, which must be opened and closed.

Once it has been produced, the biogas is piped through a metal tube to the small stove mounted inside the house.

“I don’t even use matches, I just turn the knob and it lights up,” said Marisol, a homemaker and caregiver. Her husband Manuel Menjívar is a subsistence farmer, and they have a young daughter.

In El Corozal, biodigesters have been installed for families of four or five members, and the equipment generates 300 liters of biogas during the night, enough to use for two hours a day, according to the technical specifications of Coenergy, the company that imports and markets the devices.

But there are also kits that are used by two related families who live next to each other and share the equipment, which includes, in addition to the toilet, a larger biodigester and a two-burner stove.

With more sophisticated equipment, electricity could be generated from biogas produced from landfill waste or farm manure, although this is not yet being done in El Salvador.

Marleni Menjivar gets ready to heat water on her ecological stove, watched closely by her four-year-old daughter, in El Corozal in central El Salvador, where an innovative government program to produce biogas has arrived. With this technology, people save money by buying less liquefied gas while benefiting the environment. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Saving money while caring for the environment

The families of El Corozal who have the new latrines and stoves are happy with the results.

What they value the most is saving money by cooking with gas produced by themselves, at no cost.

They used to cook on wood-burning stoves, in the case of food that took longer to make, or on liquefied gas stoves, at a cost of 13 dollars per gas cylinder.

Marleni Menjívar, for example, used two cylinders a month, mainly because of the high level of consumption demanded by the family business of making artisanal cheeses, including a very popular local kind of cottage cheese.

Every day she has to cook 23 liters of whey, the liquid left after milk has been curdled. This consumes the biogas produced overnight.

For meals during the day Marleni still uses the liquefied gas stove, but now she only buys one cylinder a month instead of two, a savings of about 13 dollars per month.

“These savings are important for families here in the countryside,” said Marleni, 28, the mother of a four-year-old girl. The rest of her family is made up of her brother and grandfather.

“We also save water,” she added.

The biotoilet requires only 1.2 liters of water per flush, less than conventional toilets.

In addition, the soils are protected from contamination by septic tank latrines, which are widely used in rural areas, but are leaky and unhygienic.

The new technology avoids these problems.

The liquids resulting from the decomposition process flow through an underground pipe into a pit that functions as a filter, with several layers of gravel and sand. This prevents pollution of the soil and aquifers.

Also, as a by-product of the decomposition process, organic liquid fertilizer is produced for use on crops.

Most families in the rural community of El Corozal have benefited from one-burner stoves that run on biogas produced in family biodigesters. Larger two-burner stoves are also shared by two related families, where they cook on a griddle one of the favorite dishes of Salvadorans: pupusas, corn flour tortillas filled with beans, cheese and pork, among other ingredients. CREDIT: Coenergy El Salvador

Checking on site: zero stench

Due to a lack of information, people were initially concerned that if the biogas used in the stoves came from the decomposition of the family’s feces, it would probably stink.

And, worst of all, perhaps the food would also smell.

But little by little these doubts and fears faded away as families saw how the first devices worked.

“That was the first thing they asked, if the gas smelled bad, or if what we were cooking smelled bad,” said Marleni, remembering how the neighbors came to her house to check for themselves when she got the latrine and stove installed in December 2022.

“That was because of the little information that was available, but then we found that this was not the case, our doubts were cleared up and we saw there were no odors,” she added.

She said that, like almost everyone in the village, her family used to have a dry composting toilet, but it stank and generated cockroaches and flies.

“All that has been eliminated, the bathrooms are completely hygienic and clean, and we even had them tiled to make them look nicer,” Marleni said.

She remarked that hygiene is important to her, as her little girl can now go to the bathroom by herself, without worrying about cockroaches and flies.

Paul interviews Dalit women in Hamirpur - a district in Northern India. All of these women have been abandoned by their husbands who fled to escape drought. Credit: Stella Paul / IPS.

By Lyndal Rowlands
NEW YORK, Nov 6 2016 (IPS)

Journalist Stella Paul was midway through an interview about toilets when she found herself, and the women she was speaking to, under attack from four angry men.

“This man, he comes and he just grabs this woman by her hair and he starts dragging her on the ground and kicking her at the same time,” Paul told IPS.

She remembers thinking, “what is happening,” as another three men followed, beating the women, including Paul who was hit in the face.

“They are blindly just beating this woman.”

“Why? Because how dare you talk about getting a toilet when you are untouchable, you are Dalit.”

The attack took place while Paul – a 2016 recipient of the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award and IPS contributor – was researching a story about women forced into dual slavery in illegal mines in South-East, India.

The women Paul was interviewing had been forced to work unpaid in the mines, but were trying to escape, some of them were attending school, and they had now found out they were potentially going to have their own toilet under a government sanitation scheme.

“They employ the poorest of the people, and they bring in a lot of women that are from the untouchable section – Dalit – and the extremely marginalised classes in India.”

“It was revealed that the whole industry was illegal – no license taken from the government – and they were taking out iron ore and selling it to China.”

“The whole day they force them to work in the mine and at night they force themselves on these women, they force them to serve them sexually.”

“So it’s dual slavery, they don’t get paid, and they have to allow these men to sleep with them, and their daughters.”

Paul, who comes from North-Eastern India, travels her home country talking to some of the poorest people in India and unearthing stories of unbelievable exploitation and corruption in places where other journalists often think not to look.

She often spends her time listening to the stories of untouchables – people who other Indians don’t consider worthy of having opinions.

“When you are untouchables your life is no better than a dog’s life. Your job is to go there and defecate in the open, because that is how you have always done and that is how you will always do.”

“Honestly I don’t feel anybody will tell these stories of these women of dual slavery, of (the) little changes that they are making in the face of huge threats.”

“I don’t see these stories anywhere, I don’t think anybody will tell them and how can I not tell their stories? So that’s my choice to go there and tell it.”

But Paul believes that although her kind of journalism often comes with little recognition she is also constantly rewarded.

“Once you start going there, meeting these people you can never become a bitter cynical skeptical person who will look down on poor people,” she says.

Listening to these stories has helped her grow in empathy and become a better person, she says.

“That is the best bonus of being a journalist, that there is this huge growth potential, internal growth.”

Yet by listening to the disenfranchised, Paul often finds herself getting into trouble, as was the case when her interviews with the women about toilets uncovered local corruption.

Paul with forest women she interviewed in Anantagiri, Inida about solar energy. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS.

“It was a positive story on how a section of these women are now coming out of (slavery).”

“I was there in a village and there was a group of women (telling me) they have started going to school … they are going to rebuild their lives.”

Yet by daring to talk about having their own toilets the women had stepped into dangerous territory.

The government of India had allotted funds to the state as part of an anti-defecation drive.

More than 500 million people in India, almost half of the total population, still defecate in the open. According to UNICEF open defecation is a serious threat to public health and an underlying reason why 188,000 children under five die from diarrhea every year in India.

“There is a lot of money that is coming in and these men, the local government, they are actually stealing this money,” said Paul.

This is why the women talking to Paul about toilets was met with violence.

After getting punched again while rescuing a girl she had asked to take photos for her, Paul marched straight to the office of a senior local official.

But the commissioner sat behind a transparent window clearly unoccupied while his receptionist told Paul he was too busy to see her.

Paul didn’t give up, returning the next day.

“We finally got to meet him, but what I wanted was not to complain about what happened to me but to interview him about … the sanitation project because I wanted to get my story first.” she said.

The commissioner pretended not to understand Paul’s English or Hindi.

“Finally he gave me one sentence and I could complete my story.”

Paul herself comes from a part of India officially designated as a “disturbed region.”

“My home province is in the North Eastern part of India, which borders China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal.”

“The army has a special power act and under a law they are legally authorised to go and take special action against people there.”

“Therefore security forces (can go) to anybody’s home without a warrant at any time of the night or the day.”

“There is rampant gender violence there committed by the army.”

“Very few male reporters actually report that – it’s the women reporters who report these things.”

Paul says that even in apparently peaceful parts of India, gender violence “is rampant” and “women reporters are specifically targeted.”

“A guy reporter never has to worry about being touched inappropriately, groped, assaulted, molested or raped.”

She says that reporting on development issues like gender violence or gender inequality is difficult because a lot of people, including government officials, don’t believe these issues are important.

“Without these issues being solved there is no real progress, no real development so we have to report on them, but then there are people who believe that these issues do not matter which makes you feel very lonely.”

Paul herself almost did not survive childhood because she was born a girl. When she was 2 years old, and sick with diptheria, part of her family did not see it as worth treating her, because she was a girl. She survived because her mother fought to save her.

Preference for male sons has led to a ratio of 919 girls to every 1000 boys in India, according to the 2011 census.

Paul has gone on to write about infanticide for IPS.

Courage in journalism often focuses on reporting on war zones, but reporting on gender violence is also a form of war reporting, Chi Yvonne Leina, a journalist from Cameroon and Africa Lead at World Pulse told IPS.

“Violence against women is the longest most continuous and the most dangerous war we are having on earth.”

“Stories like what (Stella) tells – people don’t necessarily know until they dig through in the community,” said Leina.

But this digging can lead to negative reactions, says Leina.

“When you are attacking a culture, you are alone… when soldiers go to war they are going in numbers but when you as a reporter are in face of a culture coming against the culture alone, you are alone against a whole community.”

“Anything can happen and maybe you can disappear, where I come from journalists disappear, they don’t die they disappear.”

Paul has received threats both anonymous and to her face that she too will be made to disappear. While reporting on brick kilns using child labour in her home state a man grabbed her phone and threw it in the river.

“He said: ‘do you see that phone it didn’t take seconds to disappear in the river we make people disappear just like that,’ and then he was snapping his fingers,” Paul described.

Paul is one of three 2016 recipients of the Courage in Journalism Award, alongside Janine di Giovanni, Middle East Editor of Newsweek and Mabel Cáceres Editor-in-chief of El Búho Magazine.

The awards were presented at ceremonies held in New York and Los Angeles in late October. Reeyot Alemu, of Ethiopia the 2012 recipient of the award was also honoured at the ceremony – she was previously unable to attend after being jailed for 1963 days.

Children investigate their community's newly improved toilets, one of UNOCI's “quick impact projects” (QIPS) which supported the rehabilitation of schools and toilets in Abidjan. Credit: UN Photo/Patricia Esteve

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 30 2015 (IPS)

As most developing nations fall short of meeting their goals on sanitation, the world’s poorest countries have been lagging far behind, according to a new U.N. report released here.

The Joint Monitoring Programme report, ‘Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2015 Update and MDG Assessment’, authored by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO), says one in three people, or 2.4 billion worldwide, are still without sanitation facilities – including 946 million people who defecate in the open.“We cannot have another situation where we appear to be succeeding because the situation of the comparatively wealthy has improved, even as millions of people are still falling ill from dirty water or from environments that are contaminated with faeces." -- Tim Brewer of WaterAid

“What the data really show is the need to focus on inequalities as the only way to achieve sustainable progress,” said Sanjay Wijesekera, head of UNICEF’s global water, sanitation and hygiene programmes.

“The global model so far has been that the wealthiest move ahead first, and only when they have access do the poorest start catching up. If we are to reach universal access to sanitation by 2030, we need to ensure the poorest start making progress right away,” he said.

Pointing out the existing inequities, the report says progress on sanitation has been hampered by inadequate investments in behaviour change campaigns, lack of affordable products for the poor, and social norms which accept or even encourage open defecation.

Although some 2.1 billion people have gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, the world has missed the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target by nearly 700 million people.

Today, only 68 per cent of the world’s population uses an improved sanitation facility – 9 percentage points below the MDG target of 77 per cent.

Still, the world has made “spectacular progress” in water, Jeffrey O’Malley, Director, Data, at UNICEF’s Research and Policy Division, told reporters Tuesday.

In 2015, 91 percent of the global population used an improved drinking water source, up from 76 percent in 1990, while 6.6 billion people have access to improved drinking water.

The total without access globally is now 663 million, almost a 100 million fewer than last year’s estimate, and the first time the number has fallen below 700 million.

As the MDGs expire this year, the goal on water has been met overall, but with wide gaps remaining, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The goal on sanitation, however, has failed dramatically. At present rates of progress it would take 300 years for everyone in Sub-Saharan Africa to get access to a sanitary toilet, said the report.

Tim Brewer, Policy Analyst on Monitoring and Accountability at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS the MDG goal on water was met largely because of those who were easiest to reach.

“The poorest are often still being left behind. What we need to do in the new U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), now under negotiation, is to make sure that progress for the poorest is made the headline figure.”

“We cannot have another situation where we appear to be succeeding because the situation of the comparatively wealthy has improved, even as millions of people are still falling ill from dirty water or from environments that are contaminated with faeces,” he noted.

Brewer said monitoring is key: “We need to measure basic access for the poor, as well as measuring other indicators such as whether water is safe and affordable, and whether wastewater is safely treated.”

“This is the only way to make sure we reach everyone, everywhere by 2030 and hold governments accountable to their promises,” he argued.

In countries like Japan and South Korea, according to published reports, sanitation is far beyond a basic necessity: it has the trappings of luxury with piped in music, automatic flushing, and in some cases, scenic window views — even while millions in developing nations defecate openly in nearby rural jungles or on rail tracks (with their bowel movements apparently being coordinated with train schedules, according to a New York Times report.)

The practice of open defecation is also linked to a higher risk of stunting – or chronic malnutrition – which affects 161 million children worldwide, leaving them with irreversible physical and cognitive damage.

“To benefit human health it is vital to further accelerate progress on sanitation, particularly in rural and underserved areas,” says Dr Maria Neira, Director of the WHO Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health.

Asked if it would be realistic for sanitation goals to be rolled into the proposed SDGs with a target date of 2030, UNICEF’s Wijesekera told IPS that an even more ambitious sanitation target is suggested for the new SDG agenda – to eliminate open defecation and achieve universal access to sanitation.

“I think the goal of achieving universal access to sanitation by 2030 is possible, but only if we start focusing on the poorest and most vulnerable right now (rather than waiting for the wealthiest to gain access first, as has historically been the case).”

He said: “We can also learn from the successes of the past 25 years, and especially the last 15. A number of countries have made rapid gains during the MDG era.’

For example, he pointed out, Ethiopia has reduced open defecation rates by 64 percentage points and Thailand has closed the gap in access between the richest and the poorest.

This shows what is possible when countries recognise the importance of tackling inequalities in access to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), thus unlocking wider benefits in health, nutrition, education and economic productivity, he noted.

Asked how the sanitation problem can be resolved, Wijesekera told IPS: “Sanitation is not rocket science; most developed countries take it for granted.”

“But our experience on the ground in developing countries shows that it is not just a question of governments investing money and technology. It is also about changing ordinary people’s attitudes and behaviours, and this takes time,” he said.

Sanitation can best be addressed by countries establishing and investing in people and systems at a local level to change people’s behaviours, and to get the private sector engaged in providing affordable and good quality products and services for the poor.

This, he said, needs to be led by countries themselves, and donors, international organisations and the private sector all have a role in providing financing and expertise.

He also said there is a growing awareness of the importance of sanitation as a foundation for human and economic development.

World leaders – from the U.N. Secretary-General, to the President of the World Bank, to the Prime Minister of India – are all talking about it.

“We need to translate this high level political support into action in order for all people to have access to what is theirs as a human right: clean drinking water and adequate sanitation,” said Wijesekera.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Pastor Demas Rodríguez shows a dry composting toilet in the town of Babiney, in the eastern Cuban province of Granma. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
BABINEY, Cuba , Jan 31 2015 (IPS)

Most people in Cuba without toilets use the traditional outhouse. But an innovative, ecological alternative is catching on in remote rural communities.

So far 85 dry latrines have been installed in eastern Cuba – the poorest part of the country – thanks to the support of the non-governmental ecumenical Bartolomé G. Lavastida Christian Centre for Service and Training (CCSC-Lavastida) based in Santiago de Cuba, 847 km from Havana, which carries out development projects in this region.

“Over 70 percent of these toilets are in San Agustín, a town in the province of Santiago de Cuba. The rest are in Boniato and the municipality of Santiago de Cuba, in that same province; and in Caney, Babiney and Bayamo, in the province of Granma,” CCSC’s head of social projects, César Parra, told IPS.

Dry composting latrines separate urine from feces. The latter is used to produce fertiliser. They prevent the proliferation of disease-spreading vectors and the contamination of nearby sources of water, unlike the classic pit latrines that abound in the Cuban countryside.

“In eastern Cuba, we replicated the pioneering work of the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for Nature and Man (FANJ),” said Parra, a veterinarian, during an exchange on permaculture among farmers in the region, held in the town of Babiney, in the province of Granma.“For us it’s been a really good thing because it doesn’t pollute, it saves a lot of water, and it provides us with natural fertiliser.” – Local farmer Marislennys Hernández

Five years ago, FANJ introduced dry latrines in Cuba as part of permaculture, a system that combines green-friendly human settlements and sustainable farms. It was involved in the construction of another 30 ecotoilets distributed in the provinces of Sancti Spíritus, Camagüey, Matanzas, Cienfuegos and the outskirts of Havana.

“At first people were sceptical, but they have seen the major advantages of these latrines such as the fact that they don’t contaminate the wells near their houses,” said Parra. “Water quality has improved, according to studies carried out in the places where the latrines have been installed.”

The latrines have been so widely accepted that “CCSC-Lavastida doesn’t have the construction capacity, resources or staff to respond to all of the requests for dry toilets” through its projects, which provide the construction material and specialised labour power.

The organisation is now putting a priority on rural families without sanitation, who live near rivers and wells. And in the cities, it benefits families who have backyard gardens.

Of Cuba’s 11.2 million people, over 94 percent had improved sanitation services in 2012. The sewage system served 35.8 percent of the population, and 58.5 percent used septic tanks and latrines. But latrines contaminate nearby water sources with feces and urine, especially if they are poorly built or maintained.

According to the latest statistics provided by the National Water Resources Institute, 79.9 percent of the 2.5 million people living in rural areas have septic tanks or latrines, while 16.8 percent have no toilets at all.

Worldwide, 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation and over one billion still practice open defecation, according to the United Nations.

In eastern Cuba’s Sierra Maestra, the country’s biggest mountain chain, much of the local population lives in remote rural areas.

And drought plagues the eastern provinces of Las Tunas, Granma, Holguín, Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo, the least developed part of the country.

“Dry toilets don’t waste water,” said Demas Rodríguez, the pastor of the Baptist church in Babiney, who has been here for a decade. “They’re a new experience for us, so the church has the responsibility to teach the community how to use them, and to explain their benefits.”

After using the urine-separating dry composting toilet, the users sprinkle ash, sawdust or lime down the feces hole. The urine is collected in a different compartment, also to be used as fertiliser.

“By separating liquids and solids, we keep the smell down,” said Rodríguez while showing IPS the first composting latrine built in Babiney, in the home of the Figueredo-Cruz family.

“Another dry toilet has almost been completed, and four more local families are getting the materials together to make their own,” said Leonardo R. Espinoza, a builder from Babiney who has been installing dry composting latrines and biogas plants for the beneficiaries of CCSC-Lavastida’s projects.

“In terms of materials, building the dry latrines is expensive because you need at least one cubic metre of sand, 160 concrete blocks or 800 bricks, six sacks of cement and 14 metres of steel,” he said.

Based on the lowest prices for construction materials in Cuba, it costs at least 80 dollars to build a dry toilet – and more than that, if the toilet is tiled, to improve hygiene and appearance.

Using cement blocks and reinforced concrete, Espinoza built a 60-cm high feces collection compartment, which does not drain into the ground. “The total size is estimated based on the number of users of the toilet,” he said.

Dry composting latrines have a special toilet bowl with an internal division that separates urine from feces.

Cuba does not produce the toilet bowls. CCSC-Lavastida has imported them from Mexico. But now it has obtained a mould to make cheaper, sturdier bowls using concrete. If the user can afford it, the toilets can be covered with ceramic tiles.

“In houses with foundations elevated above ground, the dry toilet can be installed inside, to facilitate access by the elderly or the disabled,” said Espinoza. “But in general they are built outside the house, and you climb up four steps to use the toilet.”

Other designs include a shower next to the toilet.

Marislennys Hernández, a 32-year-old farmer, had never heard of dry toilets until she joined the permaculture movement. She and her husband Leonel Sánchez work a 32-hectare ecological farm, La Cristina, in the rural area of El Castillito in the province of Santiago de Cuba.

“For us it’s been a really good thing because it doesn’t pollute, it saves a lot of water, and it provides us with natural fertiliser,” she told IPS.

“Three years ago we managed to build [the ecological toilet] in our house,” she said. “They should be promoted more among the rural population.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Soledad Olivera holds her young son in front of her new bathroom, whose toilet and running water replaced an improvised latrine next to her house in a settlement in Bonpland, in the northern Argentine province of Misiones. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BONPLAND, Argentina , Dec 26 2014 (IPS)

Summers in northeast Argentina are hot and humid. At siesta time, the people of this rural municipality like to drink “tereré” (cold yerba mate), which until now they had problems preparing because of lack of clean water or electricity. But sometimes small donations can make a big dent in inequality.

Andrés Ortigoza, who lives in one of the villages in Bonpland, proudly shows off his simple new solar panel, which heats up an electric shower. In wintertime, tereré is replaced by hot yerba mate – a caffeinated herbal brew popular in Argentina and neighbouring countries – and taking a cold shower is not easy even for toughened gauchos (the cowboys of the Southern Cone countries) like him.

“We used to wash up with cold water, it was tough in winter….or we’d heat the water with firewood,” he told IPS.

Picada Norte, where Ortigoza lives, was not connected to the power grid until 2010. But service is still patchy and is expensive for local families.

The installation of solar water heaters is one of the projects financed in Bonpland by the Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) Small Grants Programme (SGP).

With its non-repayable grants of up to 50,000 dollars, the SGP has shown how small community initiatives have a positive impact on global environmental problems.

The expansion of forestry activity – mainly aimed at providing raw material for the pulp and paper industry – and the use of firewood as a source of energy are driving deforestation in the jungle in the province of Misiones, which accounts for fully half of Argentina’s biodiversity.

The area forms part of the eco-region of the Parana basin tropical moist forest, which takes a different name in each country that shares it: Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

“At an international level, talking about these three countries, there were 80 million hectares around 1950, of which only four million hectares of forest are still standing today, and of them, 1.5 million are in Misiones,” Juan Manuel Díaz, the provincial sub-secretary of ecology, told IPS.

“Our province covers three million hectares and practically half of that is Parana jungle,” he said.

According to Ricardo Hunghanns, president of the Tabá Isiriri-Pueblos del Arroyo Association, 45 percent of productive land in Misiones is currently used by the forestry industry, which since the 1990s has changed the traditional distribution of land and modified the provincial economy.

“This has radically transformed the structure of agriculture in the province, where the paper industry rather than agriculture now represents 80 percent of GDP,” the head of the organisation, which is involved in two SGP projects, told IPS.

The main aim of his association, he said, “is to strengthen the social economy, from the perspective of the inclusion and productive development of our communities.”

For Hunghanns “it is essential to develop projects that diversify agricultural activity, above all to make it possible for those who have been expelled from their own land because their farms are too small, to return, as part of associations.”

In Bonpland, the association is trying to do that through the projects financed by the SGP. But it first has to work out basic questions of subsistence.

Sara Keller suffered from not having water for 45 years. Every day she went to the nearest stream, one km from her village, to haul back 20-litre buckets of water, whether she was pregnant or carrying one of her six children. Calculating the total, she walked over 20,000 km in her life, to fetch water.

But now the 52-year-old married mother of six and grandmother of five, who lives in the village of Campiñas, has running water in her home, thanks to a simple five-km pipe financed by another SGP initiative.

“I really suffered not having water, carrying it from far away in the dry season,” Keller, who now has free time to care for her vegetable garden, sew and even rest, told IPS.

One of the goals of all SGP projects is to include a gender perspective.

Women are often reluctant to take part in meetings because, due to cultural questions, they don’t like to express opinions in front of their husbands, said Hunghanns. But, he pointed out, it is women who establish the priorities for the projects.

That was the case of the project that replaced latrines with toilets. Soledad Olivera, 18, whose husband is a rural worker employed in the extraction of sap or resin, and who has a two-year-old son and is expecting her second child, is happy with the new bathroom in her house in Picada Norte, which replaced a “dirty, smelly latrine”.

“It’s so nice,” she says with a big smile on her face as she looks at the bathroom, complete with a toilet, electric shower, and, especially, running water.

The SGP, implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is financing 20 projects in Misiones, which also include the care of water sources, sustainable agricultural development, ecotourism activities with Guaraní indigenous communities, waste management and the production of medicinal herbs.

“The term ‘small donations’ [the translation of small grants in Spanish] isn’t the best. Because it’s a commitment between two sides. We contribute something, and so do the community and the grassroots organisations,” said René Mauricio Valdés, the UNDP representative in Argentina.

In return for the aid, the recipients – whether individuals or institutions – provide labour power, training or machinery (in the case of municipal governments).

In Argentina, the SGP is involved in 52 projects in the provinces of Misiones, Corrientes, Entre Ríos, Formosa, Santa Fe and Chaco, for a total of 1.8 million dollars in grants.

Diana Vega, a representative of Argentina’s Secretariat of the Environment and Sustainable Development, explained to IPS that the SGP was not hurt by the global drop in development aid.

“We staked our bets on this programme because change at a local level is essential for generating real change,” she said.

“We realised that national policies often fail to reach the grassroots or community level. On the other hand, initiatives applied at a more local level, closer to the community, are the ones that can be replicated tomorrow at a provincial or national level.”

Silvia Chalukian, the chair of the SGP’s national committee of directors, said “One of the things I like the most about the SGP is that it is structured in such a way that all of the money reaches the ground level. It isn’t lost in office expenses or administration.”

Furthermore, because it involves small amounts of financing, “there is less red tape and fewer communications problems for the people managing it…people gradually learn to handle the financing during the nearly two years of the project.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Women village councilors in Penakota, a village in southeast India, go out into a field to relieve themselves, as there are no toilets in their workplace. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
MALLAMPETA, India, Jul 4 2014 (IPS)

Nine months after she was elected head of her village council, 36-year-old Krupa Shanti has overseen some significant changes in this rural outpost of Mallampeta, 570 km away from Hyderabad, capital of the southeastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

“Since I took over, 300 people have got their Below the Poverty Line (BPL) ration cards and are receiving subsidised food, and another 200 people have received their voter cards,” Shanti told IPS.

But the village’s first woman leader has not been able to change the one thing that is closest to her heart – the sanitation for the women in her community.

“I have not received the necessary funds to construct a single toilet,” Shanti said, adding that she was extremely frustrated that she and her female colleagues are still forced out into the bushes and fields to relieve themselves.

“I have political rivals now whom I defeated in the election. What if they follow me to the field or the bush and attack me there?" -- Swaroopa Chamtla, a council woman in the village of Chowtapalli
Six hundred km away, in the village of Chowtapalli, Council Head Sandhya Rani complains of losing precious work time due to poor sanitation.

Rani’s office, which she joined in August 2013, is in an old, dilapidated building that has no running water and no sanitation facilities.

“Every time I want to use a toilet, I have to rush home,” she told IPS, barely concealing her anger. “How can a person work in such conditions?”

Still, Rani is luckier than her colleagues; of the nine women on the 10-member village council, she is the only one to own a toilet at home and is spared the shame of having to defecate out in the open.

Many of the women in Chowtapalli had hoped becoming council members would lead to a life of dignity, a dream they now find crushed.

Lack of toilets is a common problem across India, a country of 1.2 billion people that has the dubious distinction of denying adequate sanitation to nearly 60 percent of its citizens.

According to a recent report by the World Health Organisation (WHO), India also tops the list of countries with the highest number of people (58 percent of the population including women and girls) who defecate in the open.

The 2011 census found that nearly 70 percent of rural households, as well as over 18 percent of homes in towns and cities, don’t have toilets.

Census data from the same year showed that more people in India had cell phones (59 percent of households) than toilets (47 percent), a figure that also accounted for dry, open-pit latrines.

The situation is particularly worrying for rural women politicians, who say the cumbersome process of having to relieve themselves in public is prohibiting them from carrying out their duties.

Many are also alarmed by the spate of violent attacks on women across rural India, who are stalked by sexual predators and raped, molested or mutilated when they venture out into the fields at night.

One such incident on May 28 stunned the entire nation, when images of two teenage girls from the village of Katra Shadatganj (228 km southwest of New Delhi), who were raped and hung from trees, began to make the rounds on social and print media.

Since then, at least four other similar cases have been reported in the same region. It subsequently emerged that each of these women came from homes that did not have toilets, and were accosted while attempting to relieve themselves at night.

Now, local councilwomen are beginning to fear for their own lives as a result of inadequate sanitation facilities.

Thotakurra Kamalamma, a politician from the eastern coastal village of Kodi Thadi Parru, says her local council has never had a toilet. Though it didn’t deter her from participating in local politics before, the Katra Shadatganj incident has shaken her to the very core, leaving her fearful of suffering a similar fate, she told IPS.

“I have a daughter. If anything happens to me someday, who will look after her?” asks Kamalamma, who has decided to resign from her post.

Chowtapalli Councilmember Swaroopa Chamtla is also considering quitting – something her husband is also asking for.

“I have political rivals now whom I defeated in the election,” she told IPS. “What if they follow me to the field or the bush and attack me there? It’s happening everywhere, isn’t it?” she said.

The government of India currently provides building materials at subsidised costs, as well as cash grants, to rural families for constructing toilets.

But according to Krupa Shanti, one of the first women to attempt to make the down payment of 10,000 rupees (about 180 dollars) even the government rate is cost-prohibitive for many rural families, in a country where an estimated 30 percent of people live below the poverty line of 1.25 dollars a day.

She also alleged that officials in city government offices are indifferent to the plight of women in villages, and therefore delay approval of funds for toilets.

Independent studies partially support her views; according to a 2011 World Bank report, government funds for sanitation in India were woefully inadequate.

The Bank also found that the country lost an estimated 53.8 billion dollars in 2006 alone as a result of poor sanitation, a figure equivalent to about 6.4 percent of the country’s GDP.

While bodies like the United Nations have called repeatedly for increased participation of women in local-level politics, little attention has been given to the specific challenges posed by a widespread lack of sanitation.

Aparajita Ramsagar, an independent sanitation consultant and former project director for SEWA Bharat, a union of self-employed women, says that during 2010-2011 the government increased reservation of seats for women in village councils from 33 to 50 percent.

“The aim of the increased reservation was to have more women join the political process. But [the government] had not envisaged the increased sanitation needs of women in the councils,” Ramsagar told IPS.

Most officials, however, refute these allegations. According to Narsimha Rama Murthy, senior engineer at the sanitation department of Visakhapatnam, the largest city in Andhra Pradesh, delays in funding are due to lengthy processes governing state finances, rather than an indifference on the part of officials.

“We have to inspect and check the situation before approving petitions [for funding]…One has to follow a process,” he told IPS.

Furthermore, problems arising from a lack of toilets cannot be solved without simultaneously tackling the twin problem of the water supply in rural India.

Sukhantibai Partiti, who heads the Handitola Village Council in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, has been trying for six years to implement the government-sponsored Total Sanitation Campaign (also known as Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan), which aims to eradicate open defecation by 2017 – to no avail.

She says this is largely due to limited access to clean water.

“For nearly six months of the year, we depend on a single pond in the village for all our water needs,” the second-time village head, who still does not have a toilet in her own home, told IPS.

“But, while we can carry a few pots of water for cooking and drinking, it is not possible to carry buckets of water to flush a toilet,” she added.

Disappointed at the lack of opportunities available to local politicians, she has decided not to run for a 3^rd term in office; she says the indignity of running around looking for a place to relieve herself has made the job untenable.

(END)

A new toilet for girl students at a school in Murshidabad district in the eastern Indian state West Bengal. Credit: Sulabh International/IPS.

By Ranjita Biswas
KOLKATA, Apr 19 2014 (IPS)

In large parts of rural India, the absence of separate toilets for growing girls is taking a toll on their education. Many are unable to attend school during their menstrual cycle.

According to the country’s Annual Status of Education Report in 2011, lack of access to toilets causes girls between 12 and 18 years of age to miss around five days of school every month, or around 50 school days every year.“There is a sharp increase in the dropout rate, mainly among girls, as they move from primary to upper primary, because we cannot till date provide them proper toilets."

The country’s Supreme Court had ruled in 2011 that every public school has to have toilets. But a pan-India study, ‘The Learning Blocks’, conducted by the NGO CRY in 2013, shows that 11 percent of schools do not have toilets and only 18 percent have separate ones for girls. In 34 percent of schools, toilets are in bad condition or simply unusable.

Atindra Nath Das, regional director of CRY East, told IPS, “Children do not have safe drinking water, schools still do not have their own building and toilets are missing. No wonder 8.1 million children in India are still out of school.

“There is a sharp increase in the dropout rate, mainly among girls, as they move from primary to upper primary, because we cannot till date provide them proper toilets,” he said.

A 2010 report by the U.N. University Institute for Water, Environment and Health noted, “Once girls reach puberty, lack of access to sanitation becomes a central cultural and human health issue, contributing to female illiteracy and low levels of education, in turn contributing to a cycle of poor health for pregnant women and their children.”

According to India’s 2011 census data, national sanitation coverage is 49 percent but the rural figure is worse, at 31 percent.  It is even lower for Dalits or socially marginalised communities (23 percent) and tribal people (16 percent).

Lack of sanitation facilities is still a stumbling block for the effective spread of health and education programmes in many parts of rural India.

Mahila Jagriti Samiti (MJS), an NGO working in Jharkhand, an economically backward state in eastern India with a large tribal population, has been conducting awareness programmes on the use of sanitation, but is not very happy with the results.

Mahi Ram Mahto, director of MJS, told IPS: “We have done 300 sanitation programmes, even helping to build toilets in homes with funding from government agencies, but only 15 to 20 percent of the beneficiaries use them.”

Without a cistern for flushing, the toilets pose a problem, he says. “People have to carry water in buckets from a common water source like a hand pump or a pond; most households do not have taps. They say they might as well go to the open field.”

In 1999, India launched the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan or Total Sanitation Campaign, a community-based programme, under which it gives an equivalent of about 80 dollars to a household to set up a toilet. But many poor people say that is not enough and still defecate in the fields or by railway lines.

The campaign has “provisions for toilet facility and hygiene education in all types of government rural schools (up to higher secondary or class 12) with emphasis on toilets for girls.”

But provisions alone do not help, activists say.

Access to water for toilets is a major problem in many rural schools in the eastern state of West Bengal, says Vijay K. Jha, honorary controller at the state branch of Sulabh International. The NGO leads one of the world’s biggest and most successful sanitation programmes.

“We have worked in 50 schools in Murshidabad district of India’s eastern state West Bengal, providing infrastructure and running awareness programmes on hygiene. Plans are afoot to extend the work to 100 more in the near future,” Jha told IPS.

Despite separate toilets for girls, the results are not satisfactory. As in the case of Jharkhand, non-availability of water hinders toilet use. Most schools do not have water pipes running up to the compounds.

Diara Hazi Nasrat Mallick High School in Murshidabad district, where Sulabh has constructed a separate toilet, is a typical example.

Alaul Haque, the school headmaster, told IPS, “We are happy that this facility has been built. But girls still have to bring water from the tubewell because there’s no water pipe connection in the school yet.” Half of about 300 students at the school are girls.

Another institution in the same district, Gayeshpur High School, has the same complaint. “With around 300 girl students in our co-ed school, we need at least two toilets. We were happy that the toilet has been built, but it still lacks flowing water,” headmaster Prasanta Chatterjee told IPS.

The government scheme under which NGOs take up the work of building toilets does not include providing water pipes – a task that depends on local agencies.

Girl students during the menstrual cycle are advised not to carry heavy objects like buckets filled with water; so they avoid school altogether during those days if there is no easy access to water in the toilets.

Under India’s Right to Education Act of 2009, which recognises the right of children to free and compulsory education till the completion of elementary school, provision of proper toilets as part of school infrastructure is mandatory, says S.N. Dave, WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) specialist at Unicef Kolkata.

Dave told IPS: “West Bengal being in a riverine area, water is not much of a problem. But there is scope for improvement in terms of better coordination between agencies.”

Some states like Kerala in the south and Sikkim in the northeast fare better.

According to a Planning Commission study in 2013, Sikkim had the best performing gram panchayats (village councils) and maintenance of sanitation facilities, having achieved 100 percent sanitation.

An open drainage ditch in Ankorondrano-Andranomahery, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Madagascar's capital city. Credit: Lova Rabary-Rakontondravony/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 21 2013 (IPS)

Even as the United Nations laments the fact that more than 2.5 billion people in the developing world are still without adequate sanitation, both Japan and South Korea have gone upscale: offering automated toilets and piped-in classical music.

Although at a hackers’ conference in Las Vegas last month, high-tech experts confessed that virtually all computerised devices, including toilets, are vulnerable to hacking.

The Wall Street Journal quoted a 27-year-old U.S.-based computer hacker recounting how he was able to hack into an automated toilet, made by Japan’s Lixil Corporation, and flush it and also trigger piped-in music – all by a remote command thousands of miles away.

“There is nothing inherently sacred in this world anymore,” says a cynical Third World diplomat commenting on the latest automation, “not even the privacy of toilets.”

Lixil Corporation says its automatic toilets are controlled by sensors and the toilet opens its lid, plays music, flushes and closes the lid automatically reacting to one’s movements.

“The remote control plays your favourite music, and in the dark, the bowl is illuminated with a faint light,” claims an ad for the luxury plus-plus toilet.

Asked for her comments, Clarissa Brocklehurst, a water and sanitation specialist, told IPS, “I guess I would just say that it is great that computer geniuses are turning their attention to sanitation…they poop like the rest of us, I assume.”

Commenting on hacking, she said the energy and imagination of hackers could be put to much better use than hacking into automated toilets, “amusing though that might be”.

“The needs in the sanitation sector are huge, and information technology (IT) innovation is needed,” said Brocklehurst, a former chief of water, sanitation and hygiene, at the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

While automated toilets are becoming a reality, Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson last month expressed his gratitude to member states for adopting a resolution designating Nov. 19 as World Toilet Day.

“I thank the government of Singapore for its leadership on a crucially important global issue,” he said.

He said this new annual observance will go a long way toward raising awareness about the need for all human beings to have access to sanitation.

Addressing delegates, he pointed out that despite progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), one in three people do not have a basic toilet. Almost 2,000 children die every day from preventable diarrhoeal diseases. Poor sanitation and water supply result in economic losses estimated at 260 billion dollars annually in developing countries.

Eliasson said proper sanitation is also a question of basic dignity. “It is unacceptable that women have to risk being the victims of rape and abuse just to do something that most of us take for granted,” he said.

Eliasson said it is also unacceptable that many girls are pushed out of school for lack of basic sanitation facilities.

He urged every country to accelerate progress towards a world in which everyone enjoys this most basic of rights.

“I look forward to working with all partners to make Sanitation for All a reality,” he declared.

Margaret Batty, director of policy and campaigns at WaterAid, says the burden of death and disease continues to fall hardest on the world’s poorest, who risk being left behind even further. She said about 700,000 children under the age of five continue to die needlessly every year from a lack of access to water and sanitation, a situation that should be untenable in the modern world.

Batty appealed to international leaders to come together to bring about the transformative change that can be realised through everyone, everywhere having access to these basic but essential services by 2030.

A man crosses a bridge over one of Cité Soleil’s waste canals that lead to the Port-au-Prince harbor. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jul 26 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Lack of financing for a 10-year eradication plan means that cholera will likely be endemic to Haiti for years to come.

Cholera spreads via contaminated food, water and fecal matter. One of the essential parts of the government’s 2.2-billion-dollar National Plan for the Elimination of Cholera in Haiti is financing for sanitation systems nationwide.“Haiti is the only country in the entire world whose sanitation coverage decreased in the last decade.” -- Dr. Rishi Rattan of Physicians for Haiti

The majority of Haitians – about eight million out of the country’s 10 million people – do not have access to a hygienic sanitation system. They defecate in the open, in fields, in ravines and on riverbanks. The capital region produces over 900 tonnes of human excreta every day, according to the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS).

“Haiti is the only country in the entire world whose sanitation coverage decreased in the last decade,” noted Dr. Rishi Rattan, a member of Physicians for Haiti, an association of U.S.-based doctors and health professionals.

“Before the cholera outbreak or the earthquake, diarrhea was the number one killer of children under five and the second leading cause of all death in Haiti. Given that cholera is a water-borne illness that relies upon lack of access to clean water, it is highly likely that cholera will become endemic in Haiti without full funding of Haiti’s cholera elimination plan by entities such as the United Nations,” Rattan told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) in an email.

Cholera, brought to Haiti in October 2010 by soldiers from the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), quickly spread throughout the country. Almost 3,000 are infected each month. To date, over 600,000 people have been infected and at least 8,190 have died.

The death rate is on the rise in the countryside, due in part to the lack of cholera treatment centres. At the epidemic’s peak, there were 285. Today, there are only 28. Once financing ran out, most humanitarian agencies abandoned the country.

Worse, one of the two large waste treatment facilities built following the earthquake recently went out of service.

The cholera-excrement connection

Written with help from the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO), the U.S. government and UNICEF, the cholera elimination plan targets human excrement. The sanitation budget alone tops 467 million dollars.

“According to our figures, less than 30 percent of the population has access to what we might call basic sanitation,” Edwige Petit, head of sanitation for the government’s National Agency of Water and Sanitation (DINEPA), told HGW. “In neighbouring countries, 92 to 98 percent have basic sanitation.”

By DINEPA’s count, about half of households in the countryside, and 10 to 20 percent in the cities, lack access to a proper toilet or latrine. In Cité Soleil, a slum that is part of the capital region, some use any open patch of ground available.

“When our children have to take a poop, we put them on a little bowl,” explained resident Wisly Bellevue. “We put a little water in there. Once they are done, we throw it into an empty lot.”

Big institutions with septic systems are serviced by “desludging” trucks. In 2010 and 2011, for example, humanitarian agencies emptied the thousands of portable toilets in the refugee camps for the 1.3 million people made homeless by the 2010 earthquake.

Those who cannot pay for that service often hire a more economical one: the men called “bayakou” in Haiti, who empty latrines and septic systems by hand. The bayakou work at night. Most dump their cargo in rivers, canals and ravines.

Before the cholera epidemic, even the trucks used to dump the feces mixed with urine into the ravines that drain into the Caribbean Sea.

Advances and challenges

DINEPA and its partners have made considerable advances in sanitation since 2010. With assistance from the Spanish government, UNICEF and others, DINEPA built two treatment centres for the capital region, and hopes to build 22 others for a total budget of 159 million dollars.

To date, however, only three have begun to be built: near St. Marc, in Les Cayes in the south, and in Limonade in the north.

The impressive Morne à Cabri waste treatment centre, costing about 2.5 million dollars and inaugurated in September 2011, “has the capacity to treat 500 cubic metres of excreta per day, which is the equivalent of what 500,000 produce,” according to DINEPA.

But there is already a problem.

Today, the centre is closed down. The gates are locked. Lack of financing is one reason. The fees paid by excreta trucking companies don’t generate enough revenue.

Also, after the humanitarian agencies stopped managing the refugee camps – they pulled out once funding ended – deliveries from the portable toilets became problematic.

“We went from having latrine matter being made up of 10 to 20 percent trash, to 70 to 80 percent,” Petit explained. “The treatment centre was not built to handle trash. It was built to handle water and fecal matter. The pools collapsed, blocked with trash.”

Even though it is struggling financially, DINEPA is determined to get things working again.

“We are going to use government equipment. If we can get 40,000 or 50,000 dollars, we will be able to clean it,” she said.

Of course, the other treatment centre is working, but two challenges remain: convincing the bayakou and others to deliver their loads, and the financing issue. For, even if the excreta is delivered, bayakou will not be able to pay.

Another part of the plan is an education campaign aimed at combating “poor defecation and hygiene practices”. According to Petit, many rural families don’t even bother building latrines any longer.

“Over the past 30 years, a certain mentality has developed, where people know that it’s quite possible somebody else [like a foreign agency] will give them toilets,” Petit explained.

Rather than giving out free toilets and latrines, DINEPA hopes to set up a 120-million-dollar fund that will allow families to borrow the money necessary to do their own construction.

Anti-cholera plan up a creek?

But many aspects of the cholera elimination plan are on hold. Haiti requires 2.2 billion dollars, and a plan for the neighbouring Dominican Republic needs an additional 77 million dollars. For the years 2013 and 2014 alone, Haiti needs 443.7 million dollars.

The World Bank, PAHO and UNICEF recently promised 29 million dollars, and U.N. agencies just offered another 2.5 million dollars. But, as of May 31, the pledges remain around 210 million dollars, less than half of what is needed.

“[The U.N.] has decreased the amount of money they initially pledged and it has yet to actually be disbursed,” said Dr. Rattan. “This is crippling the Haitian government’s ability to implement their life-saving cholera elimination plan.”

In Cité Soleil, Michelène Milfort knows very well that there will be no plan implemented any time soon. She lives in a tent. Her camp has 38 deteriorating temporary shelters, tents and shacks and only three SOIL latrines to take care of their needs. Before SOIL’s help, they used a nearby empty lot.

John Abniel Poliné is a neighbour.

“Some people have no regular place to take care of their needs. Sometimes a person has to use a little plastic bag, that he then throws into a canal,” he admitted. “It is not always the fault of the individual. You need to understand that if the person had a place to go, he would not be forced to that extreme.”

Poliné said he wonders about the priorities of the Haitian government and of international actors, especially MINUSTAH.

“They just keep giving MINUSTAH thousands of dollars, while the people of Cité Soleil live in subhuman conditions,” he said.

MINUSTAH’s 2012-2013 budget is 638 million dollars, over 200 million more than what is needed by the Haiti and the Dominican Republic for the first two years of their cholera elimination plans.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Speaking of the widespread sanitation crisis, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson was quick to produce staggering numbers: of the world’s seven billion people, about six billion have mobile phones but only about 4.5 billion have access to toilets.

Indian children use a microfinanced facility in their backyard in a Bhubaneswar slum. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

“And that leaves about 2.5 billion people, mostly in rural areas, without proper sanitation,” he points out.

Ironically, the world is saturated with an abundance of cell phones but is desperately searching for non-existing toilets.

A cartoon in a World Bank 2013 calendar puts the numbers in an even more realistic but light-hearted perspective.

The sketch shows a villager in some remote corner of the world, armed with a roll of toilet paper in one hand and a smart phone on the other, trying to track down the nearest toilet on the global positioning system (GPS).

The screen on the mobile phone reads: “Nearest toilet 2 kilometres away.”

Still, he is considered fortunate, because an estimated 1.1 billion people, (out of the 2.5 billion without adequate sanitation), are forced to defecate in the open because there are no toilets anywhere, says Eliasson.

And so, the World Bank is trying to help resolve the world’s sanitation problems with digital technology and mobile phone applications (Apps).

Last week it announced three prize-winners of the Sanitation Hackathon and App Challenge, described as a yearlong project to recognise innovative and locally relevant apps that address sanitation challenges.

Manobi, a mobile and internet services firm based in Dakar, Senegal, has developed an SMS (short message service) reporting tool that enables students, parents, and teachers to monitor and report on school sanitation facilities.

Sun-Clean, developed by a team of students at the University of Indonesia, is an app designed to teach children good sanitation and hygiene practices. The app includes two games: Disposal Trash and Hand Wash for Kids.

And Taarifa, created by a team of developers based in England, Germany, the United States and Tanzania, is an open source web application that enables public officials to tag and respond to citizen complaints about the delivery of sanitation services.

Asked about the digital approach to sanitation, Joseph Pearce, technical advisor at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS: “These apps are great examples of the wealth of ICT (information and communication technologies) innovations that are being produced to improve monitoring and education around water, sanitation, and hygiene.”

He said such simple ideas have the potential to transform lives. However, there are key technical and governance challenges in translating these projects into lasting solutions.

“Apps will play an increasingly important role in informing decision-making, but there is no technical solution to using this data,” he added.

Data collection still costs money, and political will is required to finance and act upon the findings. Turning data into decisions and concrete actions to improve access to water and sanitation, he cautioned, is perhaps the hardest part.

Clarissa Brocklehurst, former chief of water, sanitation and hygiene at the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, told IPS that sanitation is such a huge and, so far, intractable problem that “we need to bring every bit of innovation to it that we can”.

This means solutions in terms of technology, institutions, behaviour change, financing and monitoring.

“The kinds of innovation the information technology (IT) community can bring are very welcome as a contribution. We clearly need more than apps and websites but they represent important new ways to tackle parts of the sanitation problem,” said Brocklehurst.

Andy Narracott, deputy chief executive officer of Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), and who leads the organisation’s Enterprises Business Unit, told IPS that technology alone cannot solve the global sanitation crisis.

“But by combining it with business experts, strategists, sociologists and engineers, then real innovation can happen.”

This is what the Sanitation Hackathon sought to achieve, and by looking at the winning solutions, this has been a hugely successful initiative, he added.

Technology-based innovations can play a key role in many sanitation-related challenges, including mapping demand for sanitation services, identifying coverage gaps, capturing customer feedback and communicating sanitation and hygiene messages to change people’s behaviour, Narracott said.

“But the critical challenge is how this information is used and acted upon,” he said.

He said the sector also needs sufficient capacity and finance to convert this information into increased access for people, especially those living in low-income areas in cities and towns across the developing world.

“The challenge has only just begun,” he cautioned.

Tools are only effective if people know how to use them were interested to see how the deployment of these tools works out, he added.

“We’d like to see this initiative now extended into a global collaborative platform, where many people can use them and iterate them collaboratively,” he noted.

Asked about the validity of the criticism that the international community is paying more attention to water than sanitation, Brocklehurst told IPS, “I think that in the past the international community has paid more attention to water, and that this is why we see such a huge difference in progress.

“We have met the water MDG (Millennium Development Goals) target, and 89 percent of the world’s population uses at least an improved source of water, even though some of that water may be of dubious quality, while only 63 percent of the world’s population has improved sanitation and over a billion still resort to open defecation.”

But that is starting to change, she said, as the impact of poor sanitation becomes clearer.

The health impacts are more generally researched and recognised, but more importantly, the economic impacts are now widely discussed.

Asked about the severity of the sanitation crisis in the run-up to the MDG deadline of 2015, Brocklehurst said, “The sanitation crisis is serious as we are a long way off from reaching the MDG target, and current estimates are that we will miss it by many millions of people.”

She said in many countries a huge acceleration in progress would be needed to reach the MDG, “and at current rates we would not reach it at a global level until 2026.”

More serious is the large proportion of people who lack improved sanitation who are actually using no sanitation at all, but resorting to the dangerous practice of open defecation – a practice that is dangerous not only for themselves, but for anyone living in their communities.

According to a press release, over 100 local partners supported the Sanitation Hackathon events.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided financial support, alongside the World Bank, and Toilet Hackers provided critical in-kind support.