Sarangani, testing ground for improved sanitation

By BEVERLY C. PAOYON

ALABEL, Sarangani (March 14, 2014) – Multi-donor partnership and WorldBank-administered Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) is piloting Sarangani with other selected provinces in the country to end open defecation practice by 2016.

The challenge comes in the wake of global efforts to hit the 2015 Millennium Development Goal on sanitation to cut by half the proportion of people without universal access to improved hygiene.

WSP also named Quezon and Negros Oriental provinces as testing areas.

WSP supports poor people in obtaining affordable, safe, and sustainable access to water and sanitation services. It tapped local and national government units, non-government organizations (NGOs) and the private sector to scale up sanitary conditions in the mentioned areas.

Leo De Castro, WSP project coordinator, deemed scaling up rural sanitation as challenging because significant percentage of the population still practice open defection among poor households in the outskirts.

In a report, Sarangani provincial health officer-in-charge Dr. Arvin Alejandro said some 6.1 million poor people and three million others who are extremely poor out of 9.4 million people in rural areas in 2006 have no access to improved sanitation in the country.

He said “absolute number of people living in rural areas are using unimproved toilets and defecating in the open.” This has been a phenomenon among the poor, Alejandro added.

In a global scale, around 2.4 billion people live in unsanitary conditions. He said some 630 million are from East Asia.

In the Philippines, according to Alejandro, Region 12 has contributed 24.8 percent of the total rural populace practicing the habit. Sarangani shared about 18.5 percent in the region.

In Sarangani, these poor families mostly reside in geographically isolated and disparity barangays. These residents are also beneficiaries of the national government’s conditional cash transfer program.

Most of these families do not have sanitary toilets hence open defecation is widely practiced, Alejandro said.

He said open defecation triggered “high rates of under-five morbidity across the province as evidenced by food- and water-borne diseases specifically acute gastroenteritis as the leading cause of admission in all province-ran hospitals from 2007 to 2013.”

In the absence of a structure to oversee sanitation programs in the province, Governor Steve Chiongbian Solon directed the creation of a provincial task force to pursue efforts of achieving zero open defecation status in Sarangani.

Alejandro said the provincial government has already tapped NGOs and some private sector partners in the provision of low-cost sanitary facilities to these poor households.

Currently, Alejandro calculates that Sarangani is already at 82 percent sanitation coverage. (Beverly C. Paoyon/ SARANGANI INFORMATION OFFICE)