Yesterday, November 19, was celebrated globally as the World Toilet Day, a day set aside for the creation of platforms to raise awareness about the need to appreciate the problems of inadequate sanitation facilities including household toilets.

In Ghana the theme for the World Toilet Day was "Stop open defecation, Use the Toilets" and to mark the day school children from Nima Cluster of schools symbolically queued with prominent officials for their turn to visit the toilet. The day was also declared as Basic School Toilet Cleaning Day, and teachers and pupils were expected to clean toilets in their schools.

Investigations conducted by Public Agenda have revealed that many households in Accra lack toilets and as a result they respond to nature's call in surrounding bushes.

In this day and age one finds it incredible that houses are built without toilet, a breach of the existing Environmental Sanitation Policy of 1999, which provides that at least 90% of the population should have access to acceptable domestic toilet while the remaining 10% should have access to hygienic public toilets.

Open defecation is actually one of the worst problems facing the developing world. It poses serious environmental and health threats to society. Experts say one gram of faeces can contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts and 100 parasite eggs.

With open defecation, people accidentally create breeding grounds for disease. That's why 1.8 million people die from faecally-transmitted diseases every year.

Open defecation hurts women the most: open defecation threatens absolutely everyone, but women have further problems: in many developing countries, modesty forces women to poop.

We call on Government and for that matter the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development not to renege on its promise to lead the efforts at implementing the national sanitation action plan.