Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 19 2010 (IPS) – The world s longest toilet queue, scheduled for next month, may not be a celebrity-filled event worthy of a Hollywood spectacle but it could still find a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Come World Water Day, hundreds and thousands of people are expected to line up outside public latrines and toilets, as part of a global campaign to highlight the plight of some 2.5 billion people who still lack adequate sanitation worldwide.
The event, due to take place Mar. 22, is a joint effort by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) and two non-governmental organisations (NGOs) the Freshwater Action Network and End Water Poverty.
The aim is to get the world to unite around a single mass campaign action, says Serena O Sullivan, campaigns and communications officer at the London-based End Water Poverty, a global coalition of over 100 organisations battling to solve the water and sanitation crisis.
She said the campaign is global, And at the moment, we have queues registered in 45 countries (and counting) across Europe, Africa, Asia, North America and Australasia.
To participate, she said, all you need is to organise a group of people, large or small, to line up for a toilet for at least 10 minutes.
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The campaign literature says the toilet can be real, fake or even someone dressed up as one.
We hope that each queue organiser will have clear messaging, a media plan, and will link in with global calls to action, and therefore we will have a good chance of mobilising opinion, O Sullivan told IPS.
The organisers of the campaign say there is a global crisis in sanitation: over 4,000 children under five years old die every day because they lack toilets and water, and politicians are ignoring their plight.
Access to sanitation and water should be prioritised by all governments in order to effectively fight poverty and ill-health, they say.
But most governments do not, note organisers, pointing out that half of the girls who stop attending primary school in Africa do so at least in part because of the lack of toilets.
In late April, ministers from countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and North and Latin America will meet in Washington for the first-ever high level meeting on sanitation and water.
We will be taking outcomes of the world s longest toilet queue to the Washington meeting where decision makers will meet, said O Sullivan.
She said there has been lots of progress since 2008, the U.N. s International Year of Sanitation (IYS).
But we must remember this is a complex problem with complex solutions, she added.
She said the three partners in the current campaign are calling for a massive change in the way aid is targeted.
A failure to meet the sanitation goal is a due to a lack of adequately and effectively targeted funds and also a lack of political will, she added.
In a report released last year, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says that despite significant efforts by governments, NGOs, and other activists and stakeholders, progress has remained somewhat slow and uneven towards reaching the Millennium Development Goal (MDGs) of reducing by 50 percent the proportion of people without basic sanitation.
The numbers have come down from 2.6 billion, before IYS in 2008, to the current 2.5 billion: a measly decline.
By 2015, the number of people without basic sanitation is expected to be about 2.4 billion.
This means the (MDG) target will have been missed for over 700 million people, says the report.
The study also says that most developing countries cannot achieve their sanitation goals and targets without the cooperation and support of the international donor community.
Donor countries can assist developing nations by allocating higher portions of official development assistance (ODA) to sanitation programmes, encouraging innovation, providing more financial assistance in the form of grants and improving donor coordination in implementation efforts.
The international community, national governments, and the private and non-profit sectors still have much work to do between now and 2015, the secretary-general said last year.
O Sullivan told IPS she is hoping the campaign will raise awareness of sanitation as a neglected development area, and also pressure politicians to act to stop the crisis.
A day of focused mobilisation on sanitation and water has not really been seen before, so we hope with some strong political demands and a fun and interactive campaign that we ll be able to make an impact on the Washington meeting, she said.
If enough of us take part, said O Sullivan, we can break an official Guinness World Record for the world s longest toilet queue and grab attention from the global media.
The existing record for an individual queue is 868 people.
