open defecation

Open defecation is the lowest of the five service levels on the sanitation ladder used by the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, the body that produces the official global statistics for the UN's water and sanitation goals. The programme defines it as the disposal of human faeces in fields, forests, bushes, open bodies of water, beaches or other open places, or with solid waste. In plain terms, it means having no toilet at all: not a shared one, not a broken one, none.

The four rungs above it, in ascending order, are unimproved (a pit latrine with no slab, a hanging latrine or a bucket latrine), limited (a proper toilet shared with other households), basic (a proper toilet the household does not share) and safely managed (a basic toilet where the waste is also treated safely). Because the ladder is defined by facility type rather than by behaviour, a household is counted at the rung of the facility it usually uses.

One convention matters when reading the numbers. The programme treats open defecation as eliminated in a country once the share of the population practising it falls below 1 percent, rather than at zero, so a country described as having ended the practice may still have a small number of people doing it. Its August 2025 report puts the global figure at 354 million people in 2024, or 4 percent of the world, down from 784 million and 10 percent in 2015.