NEW YORK, MAR 23, 2013: UNITED Nations Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson launched a call for urgent action which comes on the eve of World Water Day and aims to focus on improving hygiene, changing social norms, better managing human waste and waste-water. By 2025, it intends to completely eliminate the practice of open defecation, which perpetuates the vicious cycle of disease and entrenched poverty to end the crisis of 2.5 billion people without basic sanitation, and to change a situation in which more people worldwide have mobile phones than toilets.

UN called for determination to energize action that will lead to results and urged all actors' government, civil society, business and international organizations to commit to measurable action and to mobilize the resources to rapidly increase access to basic sanitation emphasizing on the urgent need for ensuring good health, a clean environment and fundamental human dignity for billions of people and achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

The MDG targets to halve the proportion of people without access to sanitation has helped to raise the profile of the issue, and 1.8 billion people gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, but there is still far to go, notes a news release on the new initiative. Meanwhile, the MDG target to halve the proportion of people without access to improved sources of water has already been met. Of the world's seven billion people, six billion have mobile phones. However, only 4.5 billion have access to toilets or latrines meaning that 2.5 billion people, mostly in rural areas, do not have proper sanitation. In addition, 1.1 billion people still defecate in the open.

The countries where open defecation is most widely practiced are the same countries with the highest numbers of under-five child deaths, high levels of under-nutrition and poverty, and large wealth disparities. Ending open defecation will contribute to a 36 per cent reduction in diarrhoea, which kills three quarters of a million children under five each year and is the second largest killer of children under five in the developing world and this is caused largely by poor sanitation and inadequate hygiene. This can reduce the cases of diarrhoea in children under five by a third simply by expanding the access of communities to sanitation and eliminating open defecation.