Making "The World's Toilet Crisis"

Lisa Biagiotti is the producer of "The World’s Toilet Crisis,” which airs Wednesday, June 9 at 10/9c on Current TV.

Scribbled across the white board in Yasu Tsuji's edit room are the words: "A toilet is not just a toilet." The ridiculousness of this phrase has haunted poor Yasu since I wrote it (and repeated it often) back in late March when correspondent Adam Yamaguchi, producer Mitch Koss and I returned from the field.

It's a silly statement, but for nearly half of the world, a toilet needs to be more than just a toilet -- it must be exalted as a symbol of modernity, success, status -- even sex.

When people practice open defecation, children get sick from fecally-contaminated water. As a result, parents miss work caring for children suffering from complications of chronic diarrhea. Medical bills mount. When teenaged girls begin menstruating, they must leave the cities and return to rural villages where there is more privacy. The cycle churns.

But preventable diarrhea deaths of 4,000 children every day, the loss of money and job opportunities and the stunting of girls' education are not enough to get people to change behavior and adopt toilets.

We visited India to show the magnitude of the problem -- 600 million open defecators -- in crowded, septic cities. We traveled to Indonesia because it's where we saw real progress with national and local governments recognizing the problem, private and public sectors collaborating to solve it, toilet entrepreneurs inventing a sanitation industry, and most importantly, people desiring to end open defecation.

It turns out, the toilet crisis isn't really a poverty problem or a shortage of toilets problem -- it's an emotional, behavioral and cultural problem. It's why governments and NGOs are trying to solve it with Advertising 101 tactics -- creating an image to spark demand, developing the supply side and then repeating the messages to reinforce the sale of the image and the product.

We spoke to hundreds of people in reporting this story. We'd like to thank all those who eagerly led us through open fields, along river banks and around street corners to show us proof of human waste...and thank you to those who invited us into their homes for the sole purpose of toilet inspection.

Below are some special thanks and links to more toilet and sanitation information.

• Therese Dooley and the UNICEF staffs in New York, India and Indonesia
• Djoko Wartono and Vandana Mehra of the World Bank's Water and Sanitation program
• Suryani Amin and the staff at Mercy Corps Indonesia
  Water Aid in New Delhi, India
• John Sauer of Water Advocates
• The Singapore staff of the The World Toilet Organization
• Anita Jha and Guarav Chandra of Sulabh International
• Jyoti Sharma of FORCE NGO
• Rajeev Singh of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations 
• Dowstream by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
• Department of Public Works (Los Angeles)
• Citra Diani for leading us to the amazing duo -- Lexy Rambadeta and Dhanny Tantri
• Laura Sperrazza and Josh Novak for the month-long stay on the couch

Thank you. We hope when you watch the documentary, you'll dream about the possibilities of toilets. We do. Even Yasu does.

Watch a Flickr slideshow from Lisa's photos here.