World Toilet Day: Focus on Equality and Dignity

Today marks the second annual UN World Toilet Day, an important opportunity to promote global efforts to achieve universal access to sanitation by 2030. With a focus on equality and dignity, this year, World Toilet Day aims to highlight sanitation as a global development priority, especially for women and girls who must compromise their dignity and put their safety at risk when lack of access to sanitation forces them to defecate in the open.

Sanitation impacts multiple sectors of development, but the connection with gender equality is particularly important. As outlined in  a blog by World Bank Group Senior Director for Water Junaid Ahmad and Senior Director for Gender Caren Grown, advancing equality for women in developing countries is not only the right thing to do, it makes good economic sense. The relationship between gender equality and sanitation and water services is reciprocal. Just as investing in sanitation and water services benefits gender equity, improvements in gender equity can meanwhile advance improved sanitation and water services. ​
 
Ending poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity—the World Bank Group’s twin corporate goals—is possible only if we continue pressing to fully understand such obstacles to gender equity and service delivery.
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Below is a round-up of some of the World Bank Group content around World Toilet Day:
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• Feature story: On World Toilet Day, Focus is on Equality and Dignity
• Feature story: Philippines: Stopping the scourge of open defecation
• Video: Motivating Through Dignity Improves Sanitation in Rajasthan
• Blog: Taking Sanitation to Scale in Vietnam
• Blog: Philippines: Owning a Toilet is a Sign of Progress
• Event: Using subsidies to encourage adoption and use of hygienic latrines among the poorest in rural Bangladesh

Join us today using # worldtoiletday, and beyond, here on The Water Blog, and on Twitter @ worldbankwater.