Bogs in Bangladesh

Hanging latrines in Bangladesh's capital city Dhaka.

Credit: WaterAid / Abir Abdullah

Adam Hart-Davis reports.

For people in Bristol and Brighton, World Toilet Day may seem a bit of a smutty joke, but to the poor in Bangladesh it's a matter of life and death.

This country is the size of England and Wales, but has twice the population of the UK. I have spent a week looking at the sanitation problems there.

Much of the countryside is flat, low-lying, and fertile, with small fields of rice and other crops that grow fast after the annual floods. The people live in small villages, in one-roomed corrugated-iron houses, with cows and chickens wandering around outside.

WaterAid is working with local partners to provide clean drinking water using tubewells and handpumps, but for washing and cleaning the women have to carry water every day from the nearest pond, which may be some distance away and is probably heavily polluted not only by mud but also by animals and by human sewage.

And the lavatories? Until recently the best option for everyone was a ‘hanging latrine’ – a precarious bamboo platform four feet off the ground, with a gap between the footrests and inadequate corrugated iron walls for privacy. These must be unpleasant to use at the best of times, but terrifying for children at night, with the lurking fear of slipping though the gap, or even of the whole structure collapsing. Meanwhile the growing heap of untreated excrement on the ground below is a permanent source of smell and disease.

Many women and children have to collect water from muddy ponds shared with animals

Credit: WaterAid / Abir Abdullah

Faeces are packed with bacteria, which are carried around the village by anyone unlucky enough to step in the muck, by the chickens that wander in looking for food, and by the clouds of flies. When it rains, the sewage is swept down towards the ponds, and the water they use for washing. Diarrhoea and skin diseases were common.

The infant mortality rate in towns in England in the early 1800s was 50 per cent – half of all babies did not live to be five years old. They died of diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera, typhoid – all caused by contamination of the drinking water by sewage. Then came mains sewerage and piped water, and conditions improved rapidly. The infant mortality rate in Bangladesh is around 12 per cent – still uncomfortably high, but much lower than a decade ago. The main factor for improvement is the latrine – arguably the most important single advance in medical science. World Toilet Day is no joke.

In urban areas the problems are similar but more acute. The capital city, Dhaka, has a population of ten million, of whom one third live in slums, each family crammed into a corrugated iron shack perhaps ten feet square. The slums are only a few feet above swampy water; so polluted water for washing is easy to get from a shallow well, but drinking water is more of a problem. Some of the slums now have good clean water piped in, but many rely on dodgy illegal supplies.
 
The toilets are even more unpleasant and dangerous than those in the countryside. Here the hanging latrines discharge straight into the water that the people use for washing, and the population density is so high that each wobbly latrine may well be used by 500 people every day.

WaterAid’s solutions: Adam explains how WaterAid is helping communities escape water-related diseases through the triple-pronged approach of safe water supplies, latrines and hygiene education.