Toilets - A Gendered Issue

When I was 17, I spent five weeks in Ghana on a volunteering project. Whilst there I taught English in the local school and worked with a local NGO (funded by WaterAid) to build toilets for families. Whilst now I am critical of the usefulness of having British teenagers mix concrete, dig holes and build walls when local people could have been learning these skills and possibly even been employed to do so,  I quickly realised the value of the project as a whole. 

You don't have to search far to find the dangers of lack of access to adequate sanitation. The WHO estimates that almost 800,000 child deaths a year are caused by diarrhoea - that's about 1 in 9 worldwide. Open defacation spreads disease and contaminates water supplies amongst the most vulnerable populations. 

Then there are the specific threats that a lack of access to a toilet creates for women and girls in particular. Most people will have heard the reports of two girls in India who were raped and murdered when they left their home to go to the toilet in nearby fields. Attacks like these are all to common place as 1 in 3 women around the world don't have access to a place to safely go to the loo! Yes, when talking about violence against women and girls we need to tackle the reasons why violence happens with the people who are committing these acts, but in this case we could do so much by ensuring everybody has access to adequate sanitation facilities.

Girls and women also face challenges on how to deal with their periods when they have limited access to private sanitary facilities. Once she has started her period a girl will regularly miss school if she doesn't have access to suitable toilets whilst there - estimates vary between 6 weeks and 2 months of each year, that's a lot of education to be missing! There are critical issues to be addressed in providing facilities, but also in providing access to materials that can keep a young woman clean and healthy during her period without unsustainable economic or environmental consequences.

This week I read countless articles about innovative sanitation systems, each developed from specific local needs and circumstances. From the solar powered, self cleaning loos in India to the rickshaw port-a-loos across Africa and Asia and the use of readily available materials (bamboo among them) in any context. This is a challenge that we need to innovate our way out of and we can do that if we invest our time and resources in the right places.