Sanitation Updates

Daily Trust (Abuja), Posted to the web 25 April 2008, Abdul Hassan

As health experts explore how to make the Nigerian society healthy, one worrisome impediment is the common act of open defecation.

The practice, hitherto restricted to the rural areas, is now a common sight in the urban centres. In Abuja, the nation’s capital for instance, it is not unusual to see adults stooping by the roadside and passing excreta, oblivious of motorists and passersby. (…)

Read all:   AllAfrica.com    and Daily Trust

Mexico’s national water authority Conagua approved a budget of 1.8bn pesos (US$168mn) for sanitation and infrastructure projects along the Balsas river, which flows through eight states in the country’s central region, the entity reported in a release.

Read More - Business News America

OUAGADOUGOU, 28 March 2008 (IRIN) - Donors announced in March that they will invest US $1.2 billion into Burkina Faso’s water sector, to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of halving the number of people in the world who lack access to safe drinking water by 2015. (…) Ambitious infrastructures The new funds, which mostly come from the African Development Bank, World Bank and bilateral donors, will be used to boost access to sanitation for more than half of the country’s 14 million people and increase access to clean water for 4.2 million, or 30 percent of the population. (…)

Read more: IRIN, 28 March 2008

The Netherlands have kick-started the Global Sanitation Fund with US$ 44 million, Dutch media reports. The Fund was launched by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) on 14 March 2008. WSSCC Executive Director Jon Lane said in a radio interview that he hopes the fund will operate with US$ 100 million a year.

Read more: Source Weekly, 22 Mar 2008

OTTAWA, March 20 /CNW Telbec/ - On the eve of World Water Day (March 22), a coalition of Canadian organizations concerned about the global sanitation
crisis is calling on the Canadian government to make investment in sanitation
and water a foreign aid priority. In an open letter sent to Minister of
International Cooperation Beverley Oda, Sanitation & Water Action Network
(SWAN) Canada called for increased investment in sanitation as a way to save
lives, strengthen economies, and fight poverty around the globe.

Read More - Newswire

Geneva, 7 March 2008 - The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) is launching on 14 March 2008 in Geneva the Global Sanitation Fund, the first global financing mechanism to increase expenditure on sanitation and hygiene.

For more info see the article published earlier in Source Weekly

Read more about the launch here

 BALI, Indonesia, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) — Four countries in Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam have suffered 9 billion U.S. dollars economic loss annually due to poor implementation of sanitation, about 2 percent of their combined GDP, a recent study conducted by the World Bank has said.

The study said that Indonesia, the biggest Southeast Asia economy, had suffered the most losses of 6.3 billion U.S. dollar per year.

Indonesia has struggled to save its state budget from the impact of the global economic slowdown, soaring oil price and commodities, as well as high inflation pressure. The government has planned to widen the budget deficit from 1.7 percent of the GDP or 73.3 trillion rupiah (about 7.97 billion U.S. dollars) to 2percent of the GDP or 83.7 trillion rupiah (some 9.1 billion U.S. dollars).

Read More -  China View

In support of the United Nations International Year of Sanitation, the World Toilet Organization (WTO), in partnership with the Asian Development Bank, is organising:

World Toilet Summit & Expo.

• An initiative from WTO since 2001, the World Toilet Summit is an annual gathering of experts with focused discussions that promote clean toilets, sanitation issues and hygiene.
• The first World Toilet Expo & Forum was held in Shanghai in 2005, and thereafter in Bangkok in 2006. It features innovative and practical solutions from leading industry names.

World Sanitation Fund Forum

• The World Sanitation Fund is a joint initiative of WTO and Ashoka Innovators of the Public.

Conference web site

The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) is setting up a new financing mechanism to help large numbers of poor people to attain safe and sustainable sanitation services and adopt good hygiene practices. The official launch of the Global Sanitation Fund is expected for March 2008.

Visit the WSSCC Global Sanitation Fund web site

An NGO is paying people to use a public urinal, while it uses the output as bio-fertiliser.

Preposterous but true. There are enough ‘pay and use’ toilets, but in Trichy district of Tamil Nadu, all those using the Ecosan Community Compost Toilet in Saliyar Street, Musiri, will get paid. The scheme started from the festive day of Pongal on January 15.

Users will be paid ten paise per visit to ECCT. The payment will be made to all card-holders who will be using the ECCT on a monthly basis, said M.Subburaman, Director, Society for Community Organisation and Peoples Education (SCOPE).

Link to the Business Standard article