Manila: Officials stressed the need for clean toilets after a government survey showed Filipinos give more importance to owning mobile phones than they do to basic toilet facilities.

“We have more Filipinos with mobile phones than those with functional toilets,” Health Secretary Dr Francisco T. Duque III said, citing data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).

Based on official demographic data from the PSA, 84 per cent of households own a mobile phone. However, only 70 per cent have improved toilet facilities that are not shared with other households.

Duque III said it is high time that every Filipino household realise that basic toilet facilities are a necessity.

He said this in a speech he gave during the celebration of the World Toilet Day to the Department of Health (DOH) central office in Manila.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), about seven million Filipinos still practice open defecation, mostly in rural areas.

“When our neighbours defecate in the open, in fields and waterways, our children will more likely experience frequent bouts of diarrhoea, have worm infections, and grow up stunted and undernourished,” UNICEF country representative Lotta Sylwander said.

Under the direction of UNICEF, the Department of Health (DOH) continues to promote the Zero Open Defecation Programme (ZODP) advocacy and health education campaign. The ZODP uses the approaches and strategies of Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS). CLTS is under the umbrella concept of total sanitation, which includes a range of behaviours such as stopping open defecation practices; ensuring that everyone uses a sanitary toilet; frequent and proper hand washing; hygienic handling of food and water; safe disposal of animal and domestic waste; and the creation and maintenance of a clean and safe environment.

Through the National Sustainable Sanitation Plan (NSSP), DOH has set an ambitious target that by 2022, all villages where open defecation are still practised shall be declared Zero Open Defecation status.

Duque, however, said that achieving Zero Open Defecation cannot be solved simply by giving away toilets.

“Households and communities need to be prepared. They should also be responsible. When our governors and mayors give toilets for free, household heads should also invest their time and resources, however limited they may be, in building their own toilet facilities,” he said.

He said the transition from open defecation to shared or basic sanitation to safely managed systems for all, “will need to be accompanied by a shift in approaches from collective behaviour change, towards strengthening supply chains and improving public services”.

“It’s the same when we buy our own mobile phones. We take care of it because the money we used to buy it came from our own pockets. That should also be the case for our own toilets,” he said.