Research puts the annual cost of poor sanitation for low and middle-income countries at $222.9 billion in 2015, writes Jim McHale.
Africa is a continent of astonishing potential. However, it is also one that, sadly, still faces a number of barriers that are currently holding the continent back from living up to its potential and unleashing the economic growth that Africa’s citizens deserve. One such barrier is the lack of proper water and sanitation infrastructure.
Globally, one in three people lack access to a safe and clean toilet. Nearly 1 billion people still defecate in the open. This leads to the contamination of water and the spread of disease, and the costs are enormous.
Diarrhoeal diseases, for instance, caused overwhelmingly by poor sanitation and unsafe water, remain among the top 10 causes of death worldwide. According to the World Health Organisation, 1.4 million people in 2015 died because of this. This is why it is so disappointing that the Millennium Development Goal on sanitation was the one furthest from being achieved.
This is not just a human tragedy, but a huge economic burden on already hard-pressed countries. Research conducted by LIXIL and Oxford Economics puts the annual cost of poor sanitation for low and middle-income countries at $222.9 billion in 2015. And for Africa, the costs have risen by 24.5% in the last five years, and now stand at over $19bn. It also underlines the toll poor sanitation is taking across the continent by revealing that premature deaths account for 75% of these total costs in Africa compared to 55% globally.
South Africa also suffers from the challenge of poor sanitation, accounting for about $2bn of the cost of poor sanitation in Africa. There’s a side to the story that numbers cannot tell. The most impacted are rural areas and informal settlements, where there is a lack of adequate plumbing-related infrastructure. In rural and township schools, for instance, the challenge of poor sanitation often leads to many students actively avoiding going to the toilet. Young girls will, in many cases, leave school to find more acceptable sanitation facilities, missing out on valuable education.
The 2016 National Education Infrastructure Management System Standard Report, published by South Africa’s Department of Basic Education, states that of the 23 577 public schools in the country, 9 203 are forced to use pit latrines, while 68 have no sanitation facilities at all; 171 have no water supply, while 5 004 make do with unreliable supply.
For the world, in general, and Africa in particular, to totally eradicate the poor sanitation challenge, a greater effort and co-operation from governments, businesses and civil society is required. The issue of hygiene and sanitation is complex. We, therefore, cannot just use solutions from developed markets. Instead, we need to innovate and create solutions designed with local environmental considerations and cultural norms in mind. This is the approach we adopted when developing the first safe toilets (SATO) for pit latrines in Bangladesh five years ago, and it is the same approach we use now as we look to expand the offerings and range of the SATO brand in more than 14 countries.
We now have a new Sustainable Development Goal: “To achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all, and end open defecation by 2030.” Let us now align in a plan of attack - we must. How can a world with the talent to develop virtual reality and put a man on the moon accept that one-third of our planet doesn’t have access to a safe and clean toilet?
* McHale is the vice-president and head of Lixil Corporation’s SATO business Unit.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.