HEALTH Secretary Janette Garin’s recent triumphant announcement that the Philippines had met its Millennium Development Goal to increase access to safe sources of drinking water, from 73% of the population in 1990 to 86.5% by 2015, should be a cause for celebration. The country, she claimed, was now close to attaining an 83% access target, with the greatest progress showing in rural areas. Any improvement made to better the lives of the poor is good news. But the truth of the matter is that under President Aquino’s administration, sanitation and sewerage reforms fell far short of what is desperately needed.

Only 7% of the population is connected to a sewer system. 26 million Filipinos, that is 1 in 4 people, are still without sanitary toilet facilities, and of that number, 7 million Filipinos are forced to defecate out in the open, in city streets, esteros, fields and bushes. This state of affairs literally and politically stinks.

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