Reply to Euractiv article - open defecation - Main contents

Reply to Euractiv article : World Toilet Day: EU should make sanitation a development priority

World Toilet Day: EU should make sanitation a development priority

This article raises a very valid point. There is no easy way to say this, but no reason to blush either. For too long, open defecation (the practice of defecating outdoors with no facilities), has been a taboo subject. But it has also been a cause of spreading disease - most notably diarrhoea and intestinal worm infections - and loss of lives, and we need to put an end to it. The threat that open defecation represents to human health is becoming both obvious and tragic with the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The virus is transmitted through direct contact with blood or other bodily fluids, including urine and secretions, which the lack of proper toilets and water supply obviously facilitates. This should remind us how crucial proper sanitation facilities are.

Over 2.5 billion people have no access to sanitation facilities, and over a billion practice open defecation. 85% of them live in just ten countries. This makes access to sanitation the most off-track of all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which the international community committed to fulfil by 2015. Therefore, urgent action is needed. And I am ready to play my part as European Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development.

There is also a gender aspect to this: lack of safe, private toilets makes women and girls vulnerable to violence and sexual harassment. The lack of a toilet in a school can also prevent girls enrolling in education in some countries.

The European Commission is a major player in the field of access to water and sanitation, spending more than €2.5 billion on water and sanitation in 62 countries, as well as other projects funded through the EU regional blending facilities which also triggered private investments. As part of the €1 billion initiative to focus on the MDGs that are most off-track, water and sanitation projects in 19 ACP countries have been funded, too. Thanks to these efforts, the EU has provided access to sanitation to over 24 million of people across the world, since 2004, and access to improved drinking water for 70 million.

For the next programming period, water issues are seen as one of the elements of sustainable growth. The countries in which open defecation is prevalent focus particularly on water and sanitation as a key priority in our cooperation - such as Senegal, which focuses only on sanitation. In view of the Post 2015 process and the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals, the European Commission has produced a policy document where access to water and sanitation is mentioned as one of the potential targets or priority areas.

I agree that more needs to be done on this area. It starts by not shying away from talking about this issue.