By Matthias Williams NEW DELHI, Nov 21 (Reuters) - Greater political will and social awareness are helping improve dire sanitation levels in South Asia, where millions of people still defecate in the open and are exposed to health hazards, a senior UNICEF adviser said. Toilet access was not a high priority for many South Asian countries, but growing health awareness and competition among the governments in recent years has led to an improvement in sanitation standards. At a conference on sanitation in New Delhi, South Asian governments are even debating spending as much as 2 percent of their GDP on improving sanitation, according to a draft of a roadmap planned for the next two years. "It's got competitive. The ministers stand up and report," Bill Fellows, UNICEF's senior regional adviser, told Reuters. "They don't want to be embarrassed by what their neighbour is doing." South Asia has some of the worst sanitation coverage in the world. More than 750 million people in the region still defecate in the open, a dangerous practice that is a leading cause of diarrhoea deaths, according to UNICEF. But faced with a tipping point seven years ago, many countries in the region prioritised sanitation, marking significant improvement. Nearly 300 million more people gained access to sanitation in South Asia between 1990-2006, but four out of eight countries lag behind their Millenium Development Goals of halving the proportion of people with no access to basic sanitation by 2015. "Bangladesh is leading, and nobody else wants to admit they're not as good as Bangladesh," Fellows said. In India, more than 58 percent of people defecate in the open -- a far higher proportion than in Asian rival China (3 percent) and Sub-Saharan Africa (28 percent), according to UNICEF data. "There is a shaming aspect. Certainly all of my Indian colleagues see the data and are just so embarrassed that they can't look me in the face," Fellows said. Fellows also linked South Asia's poor sanitation coverage to its high malnutrition rates, as people suffering from diarrhoea are not able to absorb nutrients into their body. Despite its booming economy, India scored worse than 25 Sub-Saharan African countries on the Global Hunger Index 2008. South Asia's improved sanitation coverage is due in part to greater social awareness, Fellows said. Communities are being encouraged -- sometimes through cash awards -- to work together to build basic sanitation structures, rather than relying on individuals to take the initiative. That said, reward schemes sometimes fail with rewarded communities slipping back into defecating in the open. "There is a percentage of villages that are slipping through, there is a percentage of villages that are regressing," Fellows said, citing a recent survey. Fellows said Indian women suffer "imprisonment by daylight", meaning they are too ashamed to relieve themselves during the daylight hours, which can stretch from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. Girls tend to drop out of school if there are no separate toilet facilities for them, reinforcing Indian women's lower education standards. (Editing by Krittivas Mukherjee and Jeremy Laurence)
A cholera patient lies in a bed at the Don Bosco center in Goma in eastern Congo, November 20, 2008. Fighting in eastern Congo has displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians ...
