World Toilet Day 2018 Initiative
by
World Toilet Day 2018 Initiative
by
Toilets play a significant role in our lives; Apart from providing us with a space to relieve ourselves, clean toilets are important for our sustainable, healthy, inclusive development. However, if we were to see the numbers, a staggering one in three people in the world do not own a decent toilet.
According to A Human Development Report 2006, 443 million sick days are taken by children every year because of WASH related diseases. The health impacts of poor sanitation keep people trapped in poverty, making it difficult to get an education or to work to support their families. Every person who doesn’t have access to this basic human right is affected, but it’s worse for some than others.
School girls in Bangladesh are most affected by the lack of safe, private toilets, especially during menstrual.
The WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply estimated that 41 percent of school’s lack access to basic sanitation services, while the Bangladesh National Hygiene Baseline Survey found that 40 percent of Bangladesh girls reported missing school during menstruation. This affects their active participation in school, thereby directly impacting their educational attainment and their sense of empowerment.
The lack of decent toilets also affects working women in Bangladesh adversely. The State of the World’s Toilets 2017 reports shows that Bangladeshi women miss up to six days of work a month due to the lack of proper sanitation facilities at their workplace.
We interviewed some women who expressed how the absence of decent, hygienic toilet facilities directly impact their daily lives.
Twenty-eight-year-old Shyama Das, works for Aarong as a Social Audit Officer. She often goes on field visits to remote areas of the country. Shyama has to struggle to find decent toilet facilities when she leaves her home and work station.
Shyama said, “It’s an issue for women like me whose job nature is to conduct frequent field visits.”
“We have to use pit latrines during most of our field visits,” says Shyama, adding that there are no doors on these ‘toilets’.
People use cloth or sometimes old sarees to cover the entrance of these latrines, she adds. These so-called toilets are usually situated in a courtyard shaded by a tree. Local materials, such as bamboo trusses and metals are used to build them, explains Shyama.
The latrine is shared by many people in the locality. The pit is not emptied most of the time, creating an overwhelming stench. There is no running water and no way of ensuring hygiene. Any provision for washing hands is out of the question. People have to bring water in buckets to ensure their own hygiene and cleanliness.
Shyama adds that local women who work with her also complain about the poor establishment and provision of sanitation facilities in their homes.
According to the Joint Monitor Programme 2017 report,30.8 million people use an ‘unimproved’ sanitation service in Bangladesh, while 85.4 million still lack access to basic sanitation facilities.
“I have to go to a filling station on the highway to use toilets during long journeys,” said Shyama.
There are no basic facilities such as a flush and running water in these toilets. Many working women suffer from urinary tract infections (UTIs) due to this, as they avoid visiting public toilets which are unclean, poorly maintained and often unsafe for use by women.
Twenty-five-year-old Rounak Jahan Usha, who is executive officer at the National Human Rights Commission, says that there are no accessible public toilet facilities for people using wheelchairs.
The toilets are not wheelchair friendly; in fact, most of the time it’s impossible to enter public toilets in a wheelchair, while a ramp for easy access is not even considered, she adds. Thus, for a person with disability, it is a challenge to move from their wheelchair to the toilet. “Even with physical support from someone else, who will help me enter a public washroom, I need to grab bars to make the transfer from the wheelchair to the commode,” Usha explains.
Even in cities, public toilets are poorly maintained. Most of them don’t even have functional lights, and are so dirty that they are unfit to use. Usha said she needs to frequently travel outside Dhaka for trainings. “After checking in a hotel or resort, I find it difficult to use a public toilet”, she says.
She further mentions that there are no accessible toilets for wheelchair users even in high-ends hotels in Dhaka.
There are, however, a few accessible public toilets in the capital established by WaterAid and H&M Foundation in association with Dhaka South City Corporations (DSCC) and Dhaka North City Corporations (DNCC). There is an urgent need to establish more public toilets around the country that are safe, hygienic and wheelchair friendly.
“Accessible public toilets will make us more independent and mobile. We do not have to depend on anyone for support,” says Usha.
Beauty, 30, from Kunjaban, East Rampura, shares her tiny washroom, with barely any shower space, with fifteen other people. Beauty’s bathroom is next to her shanty. The washrooms are located in a dark corridor with dim lighting.
Due to lack of space, Beauty is force to wash her cooking utensils in the washroom. The neigbours in her slum follow an open door policy. But when the stench from the toilet becomes overpowering, Beauty has to close the door of her room which has little ventilation.
Women in her slum are mostly assigned to keep the toilet clean, she says. Beauty pays Tk. 5000 as rent for her one room space.
Akiza, a ninth-grader, also lives in Kunjabagan. She says that she has to discard her sanitary napkins under her bed. When the cleaner comes to collect the waste, her mother hands them to her.
Moreover, there is no privacy even while using the bathroom, as both men and women share the same washroom, says Akiza.
Julekha is responsible for segregating waste in Panthakunjo, Karwanbazaar. She does not have a place to live, so she uses a plastic sheet as a roof, and sleeps on a sack on the footpaths of Panthakunjo.
However, Julekha feels lucky to have access to a clean and hygienic public toilet, which she visits twice a day. After segregating waste all day, she uses the facilities in these washrooms to take a shower at the end of the day.
“We can finally use the public toilet in Panthakunjo, which has a separate chamber for women. We get running water from the tap, there are toilet tissues, a bar of soap, and a covered dustbin,” she says.
A student of Architecture, Twinkle Itminan has to go to many sites in the city for class projects. She recalls a day when she was working in an area in Chittagong. It was a mostly deserted part of the city, with no public toilet facilities. She went to a small restaurant far from her project area to use the toilet, and witnessed that the poorly maintained washroom was within the kitchen space.
“It was sickening,” says Itminan.
The 23-year-old student also has to work in Gabtoli at the Sweeper Colony, where there are no public toilet facilities. She says, “I work six hours a day, designing sites, and most of the time I need to control my bladder and reign in my urge to use the toilet.
Itminan studies at Brac University and commuted from Mohammadpur to Mohakhali six days a week.
“It takes one hour to reach my university,” she says.
Itminan said she is accompanied by her sister who is at least able to use the public toilet near her university in Mohakhali while going to Bashudhara Residential Area.
Working women and students have to spend considerable time outside their home to work or for assignments.
It is a travesty that there are so few public toilets to serve the country’s huge population. Even more ironically, the toilets that do exist, poorly maintained and are often unsafe for use by women.
WaterAid Bangladesh, in association with Dhaka North City Corporation, Dhaka South City Corporation and Dhaka WASA, has established 28 modern public toilets in Dhaka and four outside Dhaka. Apart from lavatory and hand washing facilities, these public washrooms are equipped with modern facilities such as locker rooms, CCTV cameras installed in the area, showers and safe drinking water facilities. The toilets are maintained by professional cleaners and female caretakers to support girls and women with a sense of security.
For the convenience of citizens, WaterAid Bangladesh launched a smartphone app that will help you locate public toilets across Dhaka and in four major highways. The app, named 'Public Toilet Bangladesh', is available on Google PlayStore and will provide toilet locations based on users' GPS location or through direct searches.
The app also offers information on features and facilities of the toilets, such as whether a toilet has separate chambers for men and women, whether it has disable-friendly access, or is a paid facility.
App users can also rank the toilets according to their satisfaction with the services, considering factors such as accessibility, cleanliness and hygiene. Moreover, users can also add unlisted public toilets, thereby helping others locate and access these facilities while also allowing users to review them. Through this App, users can therefore play a proactive role in developing a nationwide map that can help improve public toilet facilities around the country.
Download the Public Toilet Bangladesh app(Only for Android): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=softworks.com.toilettracker
