Out of order

Madhu Kumar Tamang and her friends in the village are watching out for anyone practising open defecation.

Credit: WaterAid / Marco Betti

Picture this: you live in the village of Rai Tole in Nepal. You’ve found a nice quiet field to go for a poo, when a group of local kids starts blowing whistles and shouting at you.

It may sound humiliating, but the children's behaviour is positively encouraged! Along with the rest of their community, they have learnt that open defecation is a killer. They know that faeces, if left exposed, is easily spread by flies and on the soles of people's feet.

Human waste gets into people's homes, into their water sources and into their food. Put simply, people are ingesting each other's poo. And when you consider that just one gram of human faeces can contain 10,000,000 viruses, it is no surprise that around 5,000 children die every single day from diarrhoeal diseases in the developing world.

Rai Tole is just one of many villages across Nepal where people are working with WaterAid's partner organisations to learn about these facts and take action to eradicate open defecation.

Communities lead the process - they work with an external facilitator to map areas of open defecation, working out how much waste each household produces each year and drawing up an action plan to tackle the problem. This engagement gives an all-important feeling of ownership - meaning that projects are sustainable, lasting long into the future.

"Since we’ve had the latrines there has been a huge difference in our health." Ramchandra with the sign that shows which houses have latrines.

Credit: WaterAid / Marco Betti

It is vital that hygiene education such as washing hands before handling food and after going to the toilet, wearing sandals when using latrines and washing and drying cooking utensils is carried out alongside the construction of latrines. Not only is hygiene education extremely beneficial - with hand-washing reducing diarrhoeal diseases by over 40% - but social pressure is an effective way of spreading change.

And once one community achieves open defecation-free status, neighbouring communities are more likely to feel social pressure to follow suit. In the last five years alone, 15 communities in Nepal have become open defecation-free zones and a further 30 communities across the country are piloting the scheme.

To find out more about how communities are taking action to build a healthier future, watch our short animation about achieving open defecation-free status.