Poor sanitation kills 4 children every minute

School girl entering a toilet built with support from Plan in Senegal

7 January 2008: Plan is boosting its efforts to stop open defecation in the communities it works in throughout 2008 - the International Year of Sanitation.

By the time you finish reading this article, 4 children across the world will have died preventable deaths as a result of diarrhoea caused by poor sanitation and hygiene.

Yet while tackling poverty, improving health and education services and fighting AIDS are often highlighted as key to improving children’s lives, sanitation is often forgotten.

Despite its importance to the health of children and adults, sanitation was omitted from the original Millennium Development Goals. And its inclusion as an afterthought has done little to improve matters.

Spreading disease

More than 2.6 billion people – two-fifths of the world’s population – lack access to basic sanitation. They are forced to defecate in the open or to use medieval-style toilets that do little or nothing to prevent the spread of disease.

Unless progress improves remarkably, the world will miss by some way its target of halving the number of people without adequate sanitation by 2015.

Children's health

Too many communities view sanitation as unimportant, failing to realise its impact on the health of children and adults.

The fact the United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation gives us a chance for change. Plan will do its part by stepping up its efforts to end open defecation in the communities it works in and provide schools with proper toilets and clean running water.

Plan action

Water and sanitation is already one of Plan’s key programme areas. Plan helps communities build 2,000 school latrines each year and in the last 4 years, has helped families and communities build a further 200,000 toilets benefiting several million people.

In Asia and East and Southern Africa, Plan is now pioneering a radical new approach to sanitation, which educates communities about the importance of sanitation and helps them to construct and maintain their own latrines. They also gain the confidence to enforce a total ban on open defecation.

Success will save many of the 2,200,000 children who die every year – that is 4 every minute - because of poor sanitation.

Read more about Plan's position on water and sanitation

Visit the UN's International Year of Sanitation website