SIEM REAP, Cambodia, March 25 ----- Pointing to the murky waters of the Tonle Sap, Si Vorn fights back tears as she recalls her four-year-old daughter dying from diarrhea after playing in the polluted lake.
Her family of 12 is among 100,000 people living in floating houses on Cambodia’s vast inland waterway, and while their village has 70 houses and a primary school, it has no sanitation system. Now a local social enterprise, Wetlands Work (WW), is trying to tackle the problem by rolling out “floating toilets” to filter waste, but the high cost of installation means for now they are available to only a lucky few.
For generations, villagers whose livelihood depends on fishing have defecated directly into the water that they use for cooking, washing and bathing — risking diarrhea and even more severe water-borne diseases such as cholera. More than a million people live on or around Tonle Sap, the world’s largest inland fishery, but there is no system in place for managing human waste from the 20,000 floating houses around the lake.
Cambodia, ravaged by war and the genocidal Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, is one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia. Around a third of the population does not have access to proper toilets, according to the WaterAid charity, and diarrhea is a leading killer of children under five.
WW has installed more than 100 Handy Pods in 20 villages on the lake through two separate projects funded by European Union, and aims to roll out 200 more by 2025.The hope is that the more villagers see the toilets in action, the more they will want proper sanitation. Outside Cambodia, WW has also installed the system in 12 villages in Myanmar, but cost is a major obstacle to widespread adoption.
The floating toilets cost around $175 each — a huge sum of money for Tonle Sap fishing communities, where on a good day a villager might make $5.
Source: philstarlife.com
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