Finding a toilet in cities around the world is no easy task

Clean water and toilets is something many of us take for granted - but a new report shows as many as 2.3 billion people across the world are going without.

Bangladesh is one of the ten countries with the most urban dwellers lacking access to safe and private toilets. Source: WaterAid/GMB Akash/Panos

With more people than ever before migrating to cities, finding a toilet is not only a chore but a public health issue for hundreds of millions of people around the world, WaterAid, a sanitation charity, said on Thursday.

Nearly one in five city dwellers, or about 700 million people worldwide do not have access to decent toilets, according to the Britain-based WaterAid.

About 600 million people use dirty or crowded communal toilets and pit or bucket latrines, while some 100 million have no facilities at all, it said.

Ensuring sanitation for all by 2030 was among the global development goals adopted last year by the 193 members of the United Nations.

India was identified by the WaterAid report as having the highest number of urban dwellers - 157 million people - who do not have access to safe and private toilets, and also as the country where eight Olympic-sized swimming pools could be filled daily with excrement produced by the 41 million urban residents who must defecate in the open.

Nine-year-old Lahai holds a bucket of dirty water he has collected from an unprotected spring in the village of Kotimahun, Sierra Leone. (WaterAid/Anna Kari) Source: WaterAid/Anna Kari

The 10 countries with the most urban dwellers lacking access to safe and private toilets according to the report awere: India, China, Nigeria, Indonesia, Russia, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, Ethiopia and Pakistan.

The countries with the least number of safe and private toilets per capita in urban areas where all in Africa with the South Sudan toping the list followed by Madagascar, the Republic of Congo, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Togo, Ethiopia, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.

The report also highlighted the following urban areas where toilet troubles are most pressing:

- Defecating in the open is most common in South Sudan, followed by the West African island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, Eritrea, Liberia, Benin, Namibia, the South Pacific island nation of Kiribati, Togo, Madagascar and Nigeria.

A village girl covers a primitive lavatory with a wooden board to keep flies and smells away in Bangladesh. Source: AAP

- China, the world's most populated country, is building toilets faster than the demand created by new urban arrivals, who number about 329 million since 2000.

- Nigeria, Africa's biggest economy, is furthest behind in responding to the needs of urban dwellers for toilets. Since 2000, only one in three urban residents in the West African nation have had access to toilets.

- The line of people who lack access to decent toilets would stretch around the earth 29 times.

- Diarrhea resulting from poor sanitation such as inadequate toilets and dirty water kills 315,000 children yearly, according to estimates by WASHwatch, an online project that collects data on water and sanitation.