The Sustainable Development Goals Report (2020) notes that we are far from being an open-defecation free world. Since 2015, around 500 million low-cost toilets have been diffused, but still about 2 billion people do not have access to a functioning toilet and about 4.2 billion people are using toilets that cannot be considered to be safely managed. These challenges must be addressed because diarrhoeal diseases are among the leading causes of mortality and morbidity worldwide, especially among yo...
As many as 2 billion people worldwide do not have access to functioning toilets, and more than 4 billion use toilets that may be contaminating water sources, according to the latest Sustainable Development Goals Report (2020). This matters because sanitation feeds into almost every other SDG through improving heath, reducing child mortality and school absenteeism, and even promoting gender empowerment. Governments, public agencies, firms and charities are working hard to build toilets for the po...
Chances are – if you are reading this brief post – that you have never really had to worry about a full bladder (or worse). Of course, you would have needed to find a toilet at some point, possibly urgently, but there would have been at least one or two options. About 900 million people worldwide have no such choice; either at home or in their local environment. Another 1.4 billion people use toilets that do not meet basic standards. In short, we are facing a global sanitation crisis. UNICEF est...
Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi — and the day Prime Minister Modi had planned to make India “open defecation free”. Over the last five years millions of toilets have been built across the country and its citizens have been “nudged” to use them in various ways. To recognise the reduction in open defecation brought about by the Swachh Bharath Abhiyan (SBA) or Clean India Mission, Modi received a Gates Foundation Global Goals Award on 24 S...
Young entrepreneurs from ‘Finish Society India’ and ‘Sidian Bank Kenya’ were honoured in this year’s ‘Sarphati Sanitation Awards’, presented at the opening ceremony of Amsterdam International Water Week on 30 October 2017. Shortlisted for the Award were (i) Mr Abhijit Banerji of Finish Society India, (ii) Ms Catherine Kisamwa of Sidian Bank Kenya and (iii) Andrew Foote of Sanivation Kenya. Mr Abhijit Banerji won the category prize of €25,000. Sidian Bank Kenya is a close partner in the FINISH IN...
“Worldwide about a billion people defecate in the open — including 600,000 in India. So when Sikkim in the far northeast of India was declared ‘Open Defecation Free’ in 2016, we were curious. How did this small state, capped by Himalayan peaks and dotted with Buddhist monasteries, manage it? How did Sikkim turn the tide?” asks PhD fellow Rushva Parihar. His supervisor, Prof. Shyama V. Ramani, is an expert on (the evolution of) development economics. In her usual transpare...
Shyama V. Ramani, Professor of Development Economics at UNU-MERIT, has been working on the issue of sanitation since the tsunami of December 2004. It all started as a charity project to build toilets for women in a small coastal village in Tamil Nadu, her home state in the southernmost part of India. “The tsunami had destroyed the vegetal cover around the village and the women could no longer relieve themselves in the bushes as they used to. They needed toilets.” But the project failed, and so S...
In 2013, India became the fourth country in the world (after Russia, the United States and the European Union) and the only emerging nation to launch a Mars probe into space. But it remains part of the group of 45 developing countries with less than 50% sanitation coverage, with many citizens practising open defecation, either due to lack of access to a toilet or because of personal preference. According to the Indian census of 2011, only 46.9% of the 246.6 million households in India had their ...
Prof. Shyama V. Ramani of UNU-MERIT has been voted one of the #100 Women Achievers of India in the category of ‘Hygiene and Sanitation’, as part of a contest organised by the Indian Ministry of Women and Child Development in partnership with Facebook. The result was made public on 1 January 2016. Prof. Ramani will attend a reception lunch with the President of India, Pranab Kumar Mukherjee, on 22 January 2016 in the Ceremonial Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhavan Cultural Centre, in the Pr...
Prof. Shyama V. Ramani of UNU-MERIT has been working to make a small Indian village called Kameshwaram, devastated by the 2004 Tsunami, as clean as any in the world – and to document the process so that it can be replicated elsewhere. She is still grappling with the core problems of sanitation, waste management and safe water. Yet her work has had an impact on various stakeholders in the sanitation sector far beyond the village, as confirmed by her being shortlisted in the #100women achievers (I...