User:AMM Pittsburgh/Edwige Petit

Edwige Petit is a Haitian civil engineer who heads the country's sanitation effort and is charged with opening multiple water treatment plants in Haiti after a natural disaster caused a cholera outbreak in 2010.

Life and work
Petit is director of sanitation for Haiti's water and sanitation agency DINEPA, an agency that was created in 2011. Haiti's first sanitation legislation was passed in 1919 and recommended that every Haitian to have a toilet. In 1937 and 1942 the government made plans to provide sanitation services to the population and create a network of sanitary inspectors, but the country's social and political upheaval beginning in the early 1990’s, sewage treatment and drinking water became more scarce.

According to Mary Barton-Dock of the World Bank, "Improving sanitation is everybody's business. Each toilet built, adopted and used, means that one family won’t be affected by cholera and other waterborne diseases that cause the death of more children under five years than HIV / AIDS, malaria and measles combined."Petit ...