No Place To Go: Scenes from Ghana's Sanitation Crisis (Kindle Single)

It’s a cruel 21st-century paradox that the poor of the earth have more trouble accessing a toilet than a cell phone. For lack of a loo, fast-growing populations in cities of the developing world are suffering daily indignities and waves of infectious disease. No Place To Go takes an unblinking look at scenes from a sanitation crisis in the Ghanaian city of Kumasi while profiling a spirited, buck-the-odds start-up team that is trying to do something about it. Amid a spreading cholera outbreak, the team works to overcome challenges on every front: from getting more toilets into more homes, to transporting waste across a city without sewers, to dealing with toilet politics. In our age of digital wizardry, No Place To Go is a disturbing reminder that much of the world still suffers the lack of technological advances that date from the 19th century.

Richard Koenig, formerly a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance journalist.

Cover design by Evan Twohy.