A Stitch in Haste

It depends on one's perspective:

Five thousand children die every day globally because they do not have access to clean toilets, health experts said on Tuesday.

Wealthy governments and donors could make a huge impact on global health by making sanitation a priority, representatives from a coalition of 60 health groups said. They estimated that 40 percent of the world's people do not have access to clean and safe toilets.
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WaterAid says 1.8 million children are dying each year before their fifth birthday from diarrhea.

Of course, to say that "diarrhea causes childhood deaths" and that "lack of toilets causes diarrhea" and even that "extreme poverty causes lack of toilets" is meaningless without the next question, the question omitted from the report: What causes extreme poverty?

And the answer to that question is self-evident: Lack of capitalism and liberty causes extreme poverty. These unfortunate little souls who are dying from diarrhea are, apart from a stray aberration here or there, not dying in the United States — or Canada or Australia or South Africa. The overwhelming majority — essentially all — infanticidal poverty occurs in nations where governments create poverty through anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-libertarian regimes.

(The fact that water and sanitation can arguably be deemed legitimate public goods is besides the point. A government needs a prosperous economy — i.e., to modestly tax — in order to provide legitimate public goods. And "a prosperous economy" means capitalism, property and other individual rights, and democratic institutions. Wherever there is nationwide extreme poverty, those three pillars of civilization are invariably absent.)

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Case study:

However, during the H.R. 2003 discussion forum there seemed to be a general assumption that Ethiopia is entitled to American aid. Throughout all the exploration of the various legal issues involved, no one ever doubted that the money belongs to the Ethiopian people. When I worked up the courage to mention the issue, I was rather strongly told that America has a moral obligation to provide assistance to Ethiopia.

H.R. 2003 (Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act of 2007) is an "oppressive" piece of legislation that would require Ethiopia (one of those sanitation-deficient infanticidal extreme poverty nations) to address certain well-documented human rights violations by the regime of its dictator, Meles Zenawi, if it is to continue receiving U.S. taxpayer dollars.

More:

Because all of the instructors at Ethiopian universities are made to sign a contract that we will never say anything against the government or ruling party, I had been very careful in wording my assignment. I asked the students to select a human rights issue in Ethiopia (making sure not to imply that there are any actual problems, just issues) and find another country dealing with that same situation.
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Out of the hundred third-year students I teach, probably forty of them had inserted a special section, right after the cover page, warning me of what might happen to them were their paper to leave my hands.

With all due empathy for Ethiopia's diarrhetic babies, there is clearly a bigger problem here than "no toilets."