Toilet Day highlights sanitation crisis

Ethiopians last in line for toilets, report says

KAMPALA, Uganda, Nov 19, (Agencies): Poor countries around the world are facing a dangerous shortage of toilets that puts millions of live at risk, according to campaigners marking World Toilet Day by urging governments and businesses to invest more in sanitation.

The toilet crisis is most severe in parts of Africa and Asia facing extreme poverty and seeing a population boom.

One in five primary schools and one in eight secondary schools globally do not have any toilets, the group WaterAid said in a new report to mark the UN-designated toilet day, observed on Monday, as part of efforts to end the global sanitation crisis.

An estimated 4.5 billion people across the world lack access to proper sanitation, said the report. Some 2.5 billion among them do not have adequate toilets, according to UN figures. The lack of toilets forces many to defecate in the open – in the streets, in the bushes and by rivers and other water sources.

Among the development goals set by the UN in 2015 is a target to ensure everyone has access to a safe toilet by 2030. But campaigners warn this goal will be hard to meet if governments and businesses do not put more money into the sanitation economy.

Sanitation is “the business of the decade,” said Cheryl Hicks, chief executive of the Geneva-based business group Toilet Board Coalition. She told The Associated Press that the group is urging commercial investment to help reduce toilet shortages in countries where governments cannot afford such infrastructure.

“Half the world needs toilets. They don’t have them because the infrastructure is too expensive for governments,” she said. African countries are among the neediest.

The new report by WaterAid cites

bones.

“It doesn’t change our opinion,” said Christine Ermenc, executive director of the Windsor Historical Society. “We maintain that Windsor really is the earliest European settlement. They helped the Native Americans. (AP)

an estimated 344 million children in sub-Saharan Africa who lack a toilet at home, leaving them vulnerable to diarrhea and other water-borne infections.

In the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, one of 101 countries surveyed by WaterAid, eight in 10 schools there lack adequate toilet facilities. The same study reported that 93 percent of households in the East African nation of Ethiopia lack a decent toilet.

Joel Ssimbwa, an entrepreneur who has put up two low-cost facilities in impoverished parts of the Ugandan capital, Kampala, said he launched his business in 2016 after several times he needed to ease himself but had “nowhere

Challenge to greenhouse ruling:

The Dutch government under Prime Minister Mark Rutte last week said it would go to the Supreme Court over an appeals court ruling that it must slash greenhouse gases by at least 25 percent by 2020.

The government had appealed a landmark 2015 ruling that it should make the

This photo taken on Nov 14 shows Chinese fishermen next to a photovoltaic power station built on top of fish ponds in Yangzhou in China’s eastern Jiangsu

province. (AFP)

to go.”

Meanwhile, Ethiopians are less likely than anyone else on Earth to have access to a decent toilet, a new study said Friday.

Charity WaterAid found Ethiopia leads the world in toilet scarcity with 93 percent of Africa’s second-most populous country lacking a safe lavatory.

Instead people must defecate in the open or unsafe latrines, aiding the spread of diseases such as diarrhoea.

The report, released ahead of the UN’s annual World Toilet Day, found that 2.3 billion people worldwide lack a loo at home, including 620 million schoolchildren.

national reductions.

But the Hague appeals court last month ruled against the government, upholding the earlier court victory by environmental rights group Urgenda.

“Up until now the state has done too little to prevent dangerous climate change, and is not doing enough to make up lost ground,” head judge Marie-Anne Tan-de Sonnaville had said last month.

“There is a real threat of danger against which measures must be taken.”

The economic affairs and climate ministry said on Friday that it would now ask the Supreme Court to rule on a question of principle, namely whether the courts could make rulings on “the political choices of the government”. (AP)

‘Drop dirty palm oil’:

Greenpeace said Saturday six of its activists boarded a tanker off Spain loaded with “dirty” palm oil to protest against a Nature-damaging commodity found in everything from soap to biscuits.

The activists, from countries including Indonesia, the scene of mass deforestation for palm oil plantations, were held by the captain of the ship after they boarded at sea, the NGO said in a statement.

Prior to that, “they unfurled banners reading ‘Save our Rainforest’ and ‘Drop Dirty Palm Oil’,” it added. (AFP)