#5: World Toilet Day

Source: World Toilet Day website

Happy World Toilet Day: a day dedicated to raising awareness about the global sanitation crisis, in which 4.2 billion people worldwide lack adequate sanitation. In this blog post, carrying on with the underlying theme of development, I aim to neatly contextualise the position of sanitation in the water and development agenda and its relation to women.

In Africa, around 65% of the population depend upon in-situ sanitation, mostly pit latrines, and around 10% have no sanitation system whatsoever (Adelana and MacDonald, 2008). In a world where more people today have access to a mobile phone than a toilet; these figures are pretty shocking (Thieme, 2017). Presently in urban municipalities, there is a lack of clean toilets and washrooms nearby to its users. Individuals resort to unhygienic coping strategies resulting in severe health complications. After considering these sanitation issues, I can't even think of a moment where I have ever questioned how, when or where I would use the toilet...I never needed to. 

 

World Toilet Day (WTD) is one way in which the dialect around improvements to sanitation, i.e. talking about shit, is becoming more prominent in the development agenda. The role of the toilet acts as a single powerful object, invoking discussions surrounding poor sanitation and prompt large scale infrastructural developments. Before the introduction of WTD in 2013 and the declaration of the “year of sanitation” in 2008 by the United Nations, sanitation has been camouflaged behind targets for improving clean water as an "afterthought, if considered at all" (George, 2008). In the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set in 2000, sanitation improvement targets were invisible. It was only until the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) where sanitation goals were introduced internationally as part of SDG 6: water and sanitation for all.  

 

When the UN set new goals for the SDGs, they vowed to ‘leave no one behind’, notably women. This movement towards including women in their development goals draws parallels to how sanitation has only recently become a key segment of the development agenda. Furthermore, the main problems surrounding sanitation in Africa are due to toilets being limited, unhygienic and far from its users. This mirrors how time-poverty experienced by women in Africa is rooted in the limited quantity of clean and nearby water infrastructure. The core of the issues around sanitation and water development in Africa is similar. So if we pay so much attention to developing water infrastructure, why should sanitation be left out? 

 

Hence, the need to improve both sanitation and water infrastructures is crucial, especially as the exponential growth of urbanisation needs to match the construction of sanitation infrastructure (Davis, 2006). And so, for my next post, I will detail how poor sanitation can negatively affect women, contributing to the expanding discussion of sanitation and women in the development agenda. 

Don't forget to check out the World Toilet Day website!