Chiefs, the media, religious and civil society organisations in the Volta Region have been called to join forces using religious norms to wash the incidence of Open Defecation (OD) in the region. About 50 percent of the population of the region was said to engage in the practice, with 31 percent doing so daily, Mr Ben Arthur, Executive Secretary of the Coalition of Non Governmental Organisation in Water and Sanitation (CONIWAS) observed at a workshop.

WHO and UNICEF launched a new Global Action Plan on the 12^th April 2013 with the aim of saving up to 2 million children every year from deaths caused by pneumonia and diarrhoea, some of the leading killers of children under five globally.  The Integrated Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia and Diarrhoea calls for closer integration of efforts to prevent and treat these two diseases and sets ambitious targets to reduce mortality rates and raise levels of children’s access to life-saving interventions.

There is statistical data to show that the height of Indian children is correlated to their and their neighbourhood’s access to toilets.

You can learn a lot from measuring children’s height. How tall a child has grown by the time she is a few years old is one of the most important indicators of her well-being. This is not because height is important in itself, but because height reflects a child’s early-life health, absorbed nutrition and experience of disease.