World Toilet Day Observed:

On November 19, World Toilet Day (WTD) was observed at an in-person event at UN headquarters in New York. The theme of WTD 2024 is “Sanitation for Peace”, highlighting the essential role of safe toilets and sanitation systems in building a fairer, healthier, and more peaceful world. The event was used to kick-start a robust discussion and advocacy initiatives on climate resilient sanitation, as well as to mobilise Member States in the context of the UN System-Wide Strategy for Water and Sanitation. The initiative also strives to generate momentum for sustained political and financial support to accelerate progress on safely managed and climate resilient sanitation towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6.2 targets. 

The WTD 2024 campaign ‘Toilets – A Place for Peace’, highlights the importance of access to safe, private, dignified, and hygienic toilets, washing facilities and menstrual hygiene management (MHM) and advocates for faster action to improve and protect people’s access to safely managed sanitation. The campaign calls on governments to ensure that sanitation and water services are resilient, effective, accessible to everyone and shielded from harm. 

A central theme for this year’s WTD is WHO and UNICEF’s advocacy in favour of placing sanitation at the heart of climate action. Toilets are vital to peace, but a vicious negative cycle is also possible,  in which  inadequate sanitation contributes to instability, and instability undermines sanitation. Unless sanitation and water systems are made climate-resilient, climate change is likely to slow-, undermine-, or reverse progress on access to safely managed sanitation. This is the focus of the Practical guidelines for designing climate-resilient sanitation projects, which were designed with input from WHO and UNICEF.

Today, 3.5 billion people are still living without access to safe toilets, and across the world, sanitation is under threat from violence, climate change, disasters and neglect. Having a safe, secure, hygienic facility to use several times a day is more than a convenience – it is a human right. However, the human right to sanitation along with many other social, cultural, civil and political rights for refugees, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and those devastated by conflicts, natural disasters and extreme weather events are often caught within power vacuums of governance as reflected in an important scientific reflection on WTD published this month.

Amongst others, this reflection points to the Emergency WASH knowledge portal which offers a compendium of sanitation technology solutions in different emergency settings and methodologies for planning and decision-making processes. The article underlines the challenges of providing safe water, sanitation and hygiene in refugee camps and similar humanitarian settings, which are frequently hampered by geo-political wrangling and subject to structural underfunding – quite apart from the operational challenges of distributing relief funds and providing services on the ground. The reflection also highlights the fact that sanitation systems face increasing challenges in the context of climate change, whereby climate risks can aggravate the vulnerability of low-income communities.

In 2013, the UN Deputy Secretary-General issued a call to action on sanitation that included the elimination of open defecation by 2025. The world is on track to eliminate open defecation by 2030, if not by 2025, but historical rates of progress would need to double for the world to achieve universal coverage with basic sanitation services by 2030. Since 2000, the number of people who practice open defecation has reduced by 68 percent. Despite this progress, 3.5 billion people still lack safely managed sanitation services today. 

In 2022, around 420 million people, that is 5% of the global population, were defecating in the open in fields, forests, bodies of water or other open spaces. This poses a serious risk on public health as it can contaminate sources of drinking water. This contamination can lead to the spread of diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea, and dysentery. Also, people — particularly women and girls who practice open defecation — experience feelings of shame, loss of personal dignity, and increased safety risks. 

It should be emphasised must be noticed that the targets of SDG 6 were not designed for conflict zones, refugee camps and the aftermath of natural disasters or extreme climate events. This leaves gaps in data about the human right to sanitation for vulnerable populations. As the author of the reflection, Marcus Erridge argues: “The concept of ‘Toilets - A Place for Peace’ calls for urgent and climate resilient sanitation. With an estimated 1.4 million people dying each year from inadequate WASH, primarily in low- and middle-income countries, diarrhoeal diseases account for 564,000 of these deaths. Most deaths associated with unsafe water and sanitation are preventable.  Push your  policymakers  and politicians to find ways to reduce these numbers and protect WASH rights before, during and beyond times of crisis. If you can, donate to the WASH humanitarian organisations working on the ground. Or simply spread the word about this underreported human rights crisis.”