Having grown up in a kampong in the 1950s, Sim knows these dangers first-hand. “We didn’t have a toilet in the house, but a bucket system in the outhouse; there were a lot of incidents of typhoid fever, cholera and intestinal worms.”
Around one billion people still face the indignity of defecating in the open today, and diarrhoeal diseases a direct consequence of poor sanitation kill more children every year than Aids, malaria and measles combined.
Through WTO’s advocacy work, revolutions in sanitation have begun taking place all over the world over the past two decades. In 2013, the organisation was granted consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and achieved another milestone for the global sanitation movement that year when 122 countries co-sponsored a United Nations (UN) resolution tabled by the Singapore government to designate World Toilet Day, a WTO initiative held annually on 19 November, as an official UN day.