Mr. Ching Ong of ICRAF, citing research partnered with Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, said there was an initiative currently under way to popularize the use of bamboo in ecological sanitation.
He said an ecological sanitation project to boost bamboo production was currently underway in four African countries, as part of a four-year, US$2.5 million programme in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.
With an estimated 2.6 billion people around the world lacking access to improved sanitation in southeast Asia, the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin American and the Caribbean, UN-HABITAT is renewing its commitment towards alleviating the crisis.
Mr. Lars Reutersward, Director of UN-HABITAT’s Global Division said that if the world was to meet the millennium target of halving the proportion of people without access to improved sanitation by 2015, taking into account population growth, an additional 1.9 billion people would have to be served – 1 billion in urban areas, and 900 million in rural areas.
However, he said that if the 1990 – 2002 trend in sanitation coverage continued, the world would miss the sanitation target by more than 500 million people. He said the cost of meeting the 2015 sanitation target in developing countries would amount to an additional US$10 – 20 billion per year, based on hygiene promotion and low cost facilities.
Mr. Reutersward said that 2.2 million people in developing countries, most of them children, died every year from diseases associated with the lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene. Additionally, he added, some 6,000 children died every day from diseases associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene – equivalent to 20 jumbo jets crashing daily.
“Since almost all future population growth will take place in the cities of the developing world, new sanitation approaches for urban areas are urgently needed. This situation is particularly serious in informal settlements, where more than 50 percent of urban dwellers in the South live, where coverage is extremely low, and where untreated human waste is contaminating the water supply and the environment, with severe impacts on human health,” he said.
He said ecological sanitation could be cost effective in areas where urban agriculture is widespread, provided that proper procedures for treating and using the fertilizer are followed to prevent the spread of disease. The method was practiced in many urban areas of China, Mexico, South Africa, Vietnam and some Northern European countries.
He said sanitation had to be recognized as a national development priority with clear policies, budgets and coordination within governments. Sanitation and hygiene programmes would only be successful if people were aware of the health and economic benefits arising from improved sanitation and hygiene.