Remember that show Scrubs? Remember the time that they did a musical episode and the two lead characters sung a song titled ‘Everything Comes Down to Poo’? How we laughed. Well, little did these characters know that they would also be touching on of the great truisms in the fight against global poverty; poo, or in this case when and where people poo, is about as important an issue as there could possibly be.

In countries across the developing world there are hundreds of millions of people who lack access to toilet facilities and so defecate out in the open. Over 1 billion people practise open defecation- one in every seven people across the world. The need to tackle this issue becomes ever more pressing- lack of access to sanitation is lethal. Last year in India alone diarrhoea was responsible for the death of 200,000 people- that’s about the entire population of the City of Westminster in London or Des Moines in Iowa.

The benefits or investing in proper sanitation are clear, not just in the saving of hundreds of thousands of lives but also from a purely economic perspective. A recent World Bank report put the potential dividends of building proper toilet facilities across the developing world as $84 billion, representing a return on investment of $6 for every $1 spent. There are also crucial benefits that are a lot harder to quantify- these facilities would provide dignity, social status and security. For example, the incidence of women being sexually assaulted en route to a private area to defecate is alarmingly high.

There are numerous obstacles to change- as Sherri Thompson, commonly known as ‘Mama Loo’ for her successful efforts to increase access to private toilets in Ghana, notes, poo has become politicised. "Public toilets are revenue-generating” she says, “hundreds, in some cases thousands, of people might visit a public toilet in any one day, and each pays a fee, so there is money to be made”.

However, the political push for sanitation for all is growing. As many will know, the signature policy of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election campaign was ‘Toilets Before Temples’. Rates of open defecation have fallen by 9% since 1990, mainly due to changes in government’s policies as a result of tireless campaigning by NGO’s and other global citizens. But there’s more to do.

Therefore there has never been a better or more pivotal time for the UK government to redouble its support and funding for proper sanitation- we have the potential to give the necessary boost to a campaign for changes that could literally save millions of lives and continue to do so for generations.