Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries of the world with more the 160 million people in an area of just 147570 square kilometers. Among the total population, 76%of the people live in rural areas. More than 115 million people live on less than $2 a day. Further, based on the calorie intake, about 20 percent of the rural populations are classified as extreme poor (daily intake less than 1800 calories per person.
Over the last decade, Bangladesh has emerged as a global reference point in experimenting with and implementing innovative approaches to rural sanitation. One such innovation was community-led tatal sanitation (CLTS) approach, which moved millions of people away from “open defecation toward “fixed point defecation”. Between 2003 to 2008, the percentage of rural people accessing basic sanitation increased 29% to 88% (National Sanitation Secretariat). But according to the joint Monitoring Program for water supply and sanitation of WHO and UNICEF, the improved sanitation coverage is only 53 percent (2009).
The development activists, practitioners and policy makers recognized low-cost toilets, which are affordable and suit the local conditions f the community, as the major solution to shift community practice to fixed-point defecation using improved sanitation. In less than five years, more than 90 million people in Bangladesh shifted to fixed-point defecation. But diarrheal diseases are still the second leading cause of child and infant mortality. Only 0.4 percent of people wash their hands with soap and water before having a meal. The issue of the total quality of sanitation coverage demands a concept of sanitation that goes beyond disposal of excreta to include the environmental sanitation issues associated with the hygiene management of solid waste, waste water, and storm water.
It is because, Bangladesh is one of the counties most vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, sanitation coverage in some of the susceptible areas already has suffered huge losses from floods and cyclones that have completely inundated latrines or washed them away. For example, 23.4 percent of latrines required reconstruction or repair within two years of installation.
The sustainability issue in Bangladesh also presents a massive regulatory challenge for the disposal of septic sludge once the one-site sanitation facilities are filled and emptied. On toilet, and this number is as high as 50 percent in some areas.
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