The man who turned toilets into a global movement has issued a blunt warning to Nigeria: the country's 2030 target to end open defecation is slipping away unless leaders make sanitation a national obsession. Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization, whose unconventional advocacy transformed sanitation from an embarrassing topic into a global development campaign, says Nigeria must stop treating toilets as charity and start selling them as symbols of dignity, aspiration, and status.
Speaking to The Guardian in Abuja ahead of the International Civil Service Conference, Sim argued that sanitation reform succeeds only when governments, markets, communities, and culture align with political will. "It looks like at this moment, the 2030 target of zero open defecation is not likely to happen," he said, citing reports suggesting Nigeria may not achieve the goal until 2046 if current momentum persists.
Nigeria still battles one of the world's worst sanitation crises, with only 172 of the country's 774 local government areas declared open defecation-free despite years of campaigns and policy interventions. But Sim, famous for popularising the phrase "turning poop culture into pop culture," insists the challenge is not impossible.
Drawing parallels with India, China, and Cambodia, he said countries that defeated widespread sanitation problems did so by making toilets desirable, not merely necessary. "In India, Prime Minister Modi drove the campaign strongly and eventually they built 110 million toilets for 600 million people," Sim said. "In China, it took us about 20 years to clean up public toilets. Now virtually every public toilet in major cities is clean."
For Sim, the breakthrough lies in psychology as much as infrastructure. He recalled how Cambodia, despite lacking funds for subsidies, succeeded by creating social pressure around toilet ownership. "We made people want toilets because those with toilets were seen as higher class," he explained. "People compare themselves with one another. Eventually, it became successful."
The sanitation advocate argued that poor households often prioritise what they value socially, pointing to the rapid spread of mobile phones even among low-income communities. "Before cell phones came, people said they had no money. Then suddenly everybody bought phones because they wanted them," he said.
Sim believes Nigeria's sanitation campaign needs the same emotional and cultural engineering. According to him, toilets must be linked not only to hygiene and disease prevention but also to dignity, pride, modernity, and social mobility. He also challenged the media, academia, and politicians to make sanitation commercially and politically attractive.
"When you moralise a problem, it's not emotionally motivating. But if you dramatise it in a way that is relevant to people's aspirations, things will change," he said. "We have to help politicians who champion toilets become popular and win elections. We have to help the media make sanitation stories attractive to readers."
Sim, who attended the 2022 World Toilet Summit hosted in Abuja, described Nigeria's sanitation campaign as promising but fragmented, urging stronger coordination between government agencies, civil society organisations, state authorities, and local communities.
Beyond sanitation, the Singaporean social entrepreneur used the conference to praise the strategic importance of the civil service, describing it as the "bedrock" of national development. "If the civil service is efficient, innovative and able to serve people at low cost and high efficiency, the country will grow very fast," he said.
For the globally recognised sanitation campaigner, however, leadership remains the decisive factor. "All problems can be solved once there is leadership," Sim declared. And in his world, even toilets can become instruments of national transformation.
