Goal 6.2: Adequate and equal sanitation and hygiene services
The second goal of SDG 6 is to achieve by 2030 «[…] equal and adequate access to sanitation and hygiene services for everyone, putting a stop to open air defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and people in vulnerable situations».
There are still over 892 million people who defecate in the open, and around 2.4 billion more, lack access to basic sanitation services such as toilets or latrines. Moreover, we must keep in mind that 6 out of every ten people lack safely-managed sanitation infrastructures which are managed safely. Earthquakes and other natural disasters make the problem worse.
The photos chosen for this and the following text correspond with the activities carried out by the WATSAN unit in Haiti one year after the earthquake of Tuesday 12th January 2010, at 16:53:09, local time, with 7.0 on the moment magnitude scale (MW). 316.000 people died.
The top picture shows the building of dry pit latrine and testing “load” (weight) on the bowl. This type of basic sanitation allows control of excreta and avoids open defecation, which was a particular problem at the time the photo was taken –February 2011- as there was a serious outbreak of cholera on the island, whose rapid transmission was aided by the lack of hygiene. The sanitation activities registered correspond to the Spanish Red Cross in cooperation with the Haiti Red Cross, with funding from AECID for post-emergency work. The author worked in the WATSAN unit (water and sanitation) of the Spanish Red Cross posted in Leogane, one of the hardest struck towns in the earthquake and at over 40 km west of Port-au- Prince.