Yes.
That sort of squalor is hard for me to understand so I'll admit ignorance when it comes to third world sanitation.
One would think that living with cholera, dysentery and hepatitis ridden sewage would motivate these poor wretches to reach a consensus for a remedial solution to the problem.
Tear down selected areas of shacks for communal latrines. Burn the waste with diesel or kerosene. Bury it, pour lime on it, compost it, generate methane with it, anything but live with it flowing down the street or stream.
It doesn't sound like an insurmountable problem that requires first-world monies to solve.
Some (not all) of what you suggest still costs money; money that many of these people who are trying to get their next meal don't have. As you say, it's hard to relate to existence where everything goes just to get to the next day.
It doesn't sound like an insurmountable problem that requires first-world monies to solve.
A real sanitation system would. The article does refer to lower-tech solutions that appear to work and also generate useful by-products, such as agricultural fertilizer. It would seem (to me) that the best way to attack the problem is to go for easy-to-implement, low-tech solutions first. Living as we are with three toddlers, I know that quite a bit of useful clean water is getting flushed in our household (hopefully they'll get past this fascination-with-flushing stage soon)!