World Toilet Day: What Issues Exist?

 In commemoration of World Toilet Day on November 19^th, this post provides an overview of the role of toilets within the water, gender and development rhetoric of Southern Africa.

Figure 1: Two girls walking to the school toilet in South Africa.

Source: TheirWorld (2018).

What Is World Toilet Day?

Commissioned by the UN, World Toilet Day represents a moment that dismantles the culturally coloured taboos of talking about human waste, rendering visible the 3.6 billion people without access to safely managed sanitation across the world. This directly responds to the 6^th UN Sustainable Development Goal, ensuring access to water and sanitation for all. Recognising that sanitation has historically been camouflaged behind the more photogenic issue of clean water, World Toilet Day aims to bring faecal issues to light.

A Public Health Crisis

Diarrhoea kills approximately 2,195 children daily. Open defecation contributes to this, when sick people excrete in or near a water source used for drinking or irrigation. In 2006, 13% of Southern Africa’s population practised open defecation, as shown in Figure 2. 

Figure 2: A graph to illustrate the trends in the proportion of the African population using either an improved, or shared, or unimproved sanitation facility, or practising open defecation, by sub-region, from 1990 – 2006.

Source: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation (2008).

While the 21% indicating ‘shared [sanitation] facilities’ may appear promising, it conceals limitations evident through lived experiences. For example, there may be a charge deterring use. The shared toilets may be closed during the night, encouraging the use of buckets. Thirdly, they may be overused and under cleaned, suggesting the statistics shift at various times. 

Second Wave Urbanisation

 

While open defecation is predominantly a rural phenomenon, due to a lack of piped infrastructure, shared toilets are more common within informal city settlements, derogatorily deemed ‘slums’. To understand why sanitation inequality exists in these areas, ‘second wave urbanisation’ must be explained. 

  

In contrast to ‘first wave urbanisation’, occurring from 1750 to 1950 in the Global North, ‘second wave urbanisation’ refers to the mass migration of people to centres of concentrated economic opportunity in a much shorter time frame, without the expectation of guaranteed waged work.  This has characterised African cities in recent history, such as East London in South Africa's Eastern Cape, despite being manifested across the continent in diverse forms. 

Davis’s alarmist text ‘Planet of the Slums’, illustrates an apocalyptic vision of this unregulated, unplanned urbanisation. He argues ‘urban municipalities are ill-equipped to deal with rapid urbanisation and associated demand for basic services’, which Pieterse’s 'slum-producing logic' supports. As contexts of informality provide a small tax base to fund infrastructural investment, demand frequently outstrips supply. Regarding sanitation provisions, the lack of safe, clean toilets for the urban poor in East London, and how these are shared among many households, evidences this.

                                       Figure 3: A diagram to illustrate Pieterse's 'slum-producing logic'.

Source: UN Habitat-Worldwide (2014).

Gender Issues 

The lack of safe toilets in Southern Africa disproportionately impacts women in both urban and rural areas for two main reasons. 

i) Menstruation 

Women and girls may be absent from work or school for up to five days per month due to menstruation. Drawing on Macleod et al.’s study of schools in the Eastern Cape, this can be explained through the expense of sanitary wear, inadequate sanitation facilities, such as missing toilet paper, locks on doors, towels and soap, in addition to ‘feelings of unsafety’, concerning a fear of dirt/infections/diseases, a lack of privacy, bad odours and social stigma when using toilets at school. This is exacerbated by cultural taboos deeming women ‘unclean’ during menstruation, evoking feelings of shame, embarrassment and the preference to stay at home. 

Such absenteeism ensnares women in negative feedback loops regarding gender inequality and poverty. As women are more likely to drop out of school and attain a lower educational standard than men, their future employment opportunities and chance for a reliable income are dampened.

ii) Gender- based Violence 

Open defecation physically exposes women’s bodies, making them susceptible to sexual assault as the location is discreet. Travelling to and from shared toilets, particular at night, further endangers women to sexual assault.

So Just Build More Toilets?

Subsequent posts will outline which solutions can address these issues, and why building more toilets without gender sensitive governance is not the answer.