Six million lack toilets:Official

AN estimated 85 per cent (six million) of the population in rural areas in Papua New Guinea do not have access to formal toilets.
Imelda Torie, office manager for Sago Network in Port Moresby revealed that in 2020, the World Bank released statistics that showed how 13 per cent of deaths in children was related to poor hygiene and dysentery.
“Looking at it this way, 85 per cent of people do not have toilets,” she said.
“That’s out of the 87 per cent of the population who still live in rural areas. “So that’s 6.6 million people with no access to formalised toilets, data taken from the World Bank”.
“In urban centres, there are different stages of sanitation, some are fully compliant while some are not but the Sago network will be trying to address that statistic and reduce the gap through our dry toilets.”
The Sago Network is a not for profit organisation which began in 2011, focused on strengthening the lives of communities through education and community awareness on Water and Sanitation and Hygiene (Wash) programmes.
Torie pointed out that another statistic they looked at when they delivered their sanitation programme to communities was the number of deaths attributed to diarrhoea and dysentery because it came from contact with faeces or contaminated drinking water.
“According to the World Bank, 13 per cent of the deaths in children was related to diarrhoea and dysentery, which also can be traced back to toilets; and this is PNG wide,” she said.
At the time the report was released, World Bank estimated PNG’s population to be 8.9 million.
With no way of knowing how much that figure had increased since, it was also difficult to tell how wide that gap was now.
One of the directors of the Sago Network, Rosemary Korawali, told The National that their organisation and others like them in the future, will hopefully be working with big companies or Government agencies that had a WaSH policy in place.
“Looking at sectors, where one of their corporate social responsibility targets is to improve the WaSH practices, we’d like to work with the communities to improve health and hygiene standards,” she said.
Torie pointed out that because people were becoming more aware of the environment as well, they were slowly starting to take sanitation and hygiene more seriously and catering to health and hygiene standards but more must be done.
More interest from the government was needed on the importance of Wash across the country and how it was to have access to safe drinking water, proper sanitation systems and better hygiene standards.