Teachers Without Borders

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Open defecation—humans defecating outside—is the ugly stepsister of clean water scarcity, which we commemorate on World Water Day. Two-and-half billion people lack access to even simple pit toilets, which is three times as many people as lack access to clean drinking water and results in two million preventable deaths per year, mostly of children under five from intestinal diseases.

Jack Sim, the self-described “evangelist of toilets,” from the World Toilet Organization, theorizes that’s because “every politician wants to be photographed standing next to a new well, but no one wants to be photographed standing next to a new toilet.” And without some portion of the powers that be to drive a story, coverage becomes scarce.

India has the largest number of open defecators in the world, over 600 million of them. At a certain level, this fact is inescapable. Within a hundred yards of our five star hotel in New Delhi, we could find expanses of human feces—we could find them because we could smell them. Touring Delhi slum clusters with local activists, we traversed neighborhoods where 5,000 people share 20 public toilets, which is nearly the same as having no toilets, resulting in even vaster expanses of human feces. But in urban areas, open defecation can also be invisible in the way poor people can quickly become invisible.

Unsafe water and poor sanitation claim 4,500 lives day. What should we do about it?

On Monday, March 22, World Water Day celebrates its 17th year of publicizing water issues with the theme “Clean Water for a Healthy World.” Our Global Issues/Citizen Voices essay contest highlights this theme with hopes of prolonging the conversation. From entrants detailing first-hand accounts of how the lack of access to clean water has affected the lives of their families and communities to policy-based analyses of the issues and solutions, the participants consider a range of points, each adding a unique perspective to the dialogue.

Yet 1.1 billion people continue to live without access to reliable sources of clean water.

However, with almost 39% of the world’s population or over 2.6 billion people living without improved sanitation facilities, the report also points out that much more needs to be done to come close to the sanitation MDG target. If the current trend continues unchanged, the international community will miss the 2015 sanitation MDG by almost one billion people.

While the UN report showed that progress has been made in many areas, the world is still falling short of meeting the MDGs, and the presentation at the World Affairs conference offered great insight as to why hunger is such a deciding factor on achieving the these goals.

“Hunger is the common enemy to all [the MDGs].” It makes sense that the eradication of hunger and extreme poverty is the first MDG, as none of the others can be accomplished without this. Children will have to work rather than go to school if their families are starving, and good nutrition is essential to reducing child mortality and improving maternal health. Drugs to treat malaria and HIV will be ineffective if the patient is famished, (think how many drugs instruct to take with food), and women cannot be empowered and support themselves if they have nothing to eat. For these reasons and more, hunger is the central roadblock to achieving the MDGs.