Alright Global Citizens, get prepared for some potty talk. Specifically, open defecation talk. It may not be the prettiest of topics, but it’s an important one. And with sanitation being a key component of the Global Goals, it’s time to flush out (pun intended) new strategies to stop people from pooping in public.

So What’s the Problem?

Fact: “About 1.1 billion people around the world defecate in the open because they do not have access to public sanitation,” according to the BBC. India contributes over 590 million people to this total, which is close to 50% of their population.

It’s a serious health concern that Global Citizen has been campaigning to improve for  years. Open defecation heightens the risk of contracting diseases like hepatitis and diarrhea. When flies feed on open waste it then travels with them when they bzzzzz over to someone’s pile of food. When people poop in rivers it contaminates the water supply.

Open defecation also increases the risk of sexual assault for women who are forced to put themselves in a vulnerable position when they relieve themselves in the open. In 2014, two teenaged girls were gang raped and lynched after they went to a nearby tree to use the bathroom.

Prime Minister Modi has made ending open defecation a top concern. One of his campaign slogans was “Toilets first, temples later” and he has made sure people know they should be as devoted to good hygiene as they are to religious worship. He pledged to provide sanitary toilets for over 60 million homes by 2019, and millions of toilets have already been constructed.

Image: SuSanA Secretariat, Wikimedia Commons

But even with new toilets, there’s still the problem of getting people to use them.

Why?

Some people think witches live in the toilets. Some people use them as storage closets. Some people enjoy their morning outdoor poop walks too much. Some people don’t want to degrade themselves and deal with pit latrine clean up. For some people it’s as simple as old habits die hard.

Image: Ajay Tallam

Getting Creative

Since obviously an end to open defecation needs to involve more than just providing access to toilets, India has employed some out-of-the-box ideas to promote good hygiene. A few of the best strategies:

via GIPHY

• $$$- Kids are getting paid to poop! Every time a kid uses the public toilet to go to the bathroom it’s recorded on a card. At the end of the month they get one rupee for every toilet use. One kid has already expressed her plans to use the money towards school. 

• Pop culture- Bollywood is making a satirical comedy about open defecation! Called “Ek Prem Katha” (“A Love Story”) the plot is something along the lines of a woman won’t marry a man until his family installs a toilet, which (as crazy as it sounds) is actually based on real life because…

• “No Toilet, No Bride”- A campaign to encourage women to require their grooms-to-be to install toilets in their house before they marry them. It would avoid situation like this...

via GIPHY

• Ridin Poopin with the top down- Open roof toilets were created to ease the transition for men who felt claustrophobic. Monsoon season remains a question mark.

And these are just ideas for toilets! India has plenty of other innovations for tackling sanitation issues in general.

Despite new strategies, a lot of critics maintain that before a sanitation program in India can succeed the issue of how to clean out the pit latrines/ sewer lines/ septic tanks has to be addressed. Dispelling theories about witches and breaking habits might be doable, but the act of cleaning human waste is associated with the lowest caste system in India and many men simply won’t do it.

But the beauty of our interconnected world means that ideas can come from all kinds of places. A new strategy for a similar sanitation problem in Senegal might provide the answer: the Uber for poop. In the capital of Dakar most of the public toilets are pit latrines, as is the case in India, and people have to pay to have them cleaned out. But the cost was too high and the pit emptiers were limited by their union to take on solo jobs. So people sought out their own, cheaper, alternatives, often at a risk to their health.

And then came along a new idea. It’s a SMS service where people can simply text when they need their latrine pits emptied and a computer service sends out a bid for the job to all the emptiers in the area. It starts a bidding war that lowers prices. As new technologies emerge that could turn fecal matter into a valuable commodity, like electricity or fertilizer, the SMS service could revolutionize the game and people might even make money from selling their poop.