World Toilet Day

One week ago, on the 19th November, it was World Toilet Day. Shameful as it might be to admit, I did not know too much about it, apparently having lived under a toilet shaped rock up until this year. I decided to do some research and get in the know.  

The first thing that you see when you click onto the official World Toilet Day website, is this image below, with two Asian women smiling at the camera and the hashtag 'we can't wait' superimposed over them.  

Image sourced from: http://www.worldtoiletday.info/

The fact that it is two adult women used in the headline image of the website speaks volumes about the intrinsic relationship between women and sanitation. Whilst World Toilet Day is not solely about improving female access to adequate sanitation facilities, there is a clear recognition that women stand to lose more than men everyday their sanitary needs aren't accommodated to even half the level that we would expect in the West  (Sommer & Caruso, 2015). World Toilet Day is about bringing awareness and removing taboos around the global sanitation crisis, so that it can become a part of academic and public discourses (World Toilet Day, 2015). According to UN Data, there are still nearly one billion people who have no alternative but to defecate in the open, and a further 1.4 billion without safe and reliable access to proper sanitation. That makes almost 2.4 billion people who experience sub-par sanitation facilities on a daily basis, and the health and safety implications that come with it. Environmental contamination and the spread of waterborne diseases come hand in hand with poor sanitation provision. For example, in Sabon Zongo, a small community in Accra Ghana, many residents can't afford to pay for the few sanitation services provided, and so prefer to package their excrement in plastic bags and dispose of them within the community (Owusu, 2010). This method of disposal, along with choked drainage systems and inadequate refuse collection have resulted in contaminated water systems. Consequently the area has a high prevalence of dysentery and diarrhoea as well as disease spread by mosquitoes which breed in stagnant piles of liquid waste. 

Whilst these health issues are the most recognised issues to arise from inadequate sanitation provision, there are also significant social impacts, particularly for women and girls. Where latrines are provided, they may be located a distance from the household, meaning that people, especially females, can be vulnerable to attack during the night when no one else might be around (Sommer & Caruso, 2015). Inadequate sanitation provision can also impact on female education, particularly for teen girls whilst they are menstruating. Girls often choose to skip school rather than being thought of as unclean when she is unable to hide the fact that she is on her period. The next post will deal in more detail with the relationship between gender and sanitation, and the particular issues faced by women in this. 

World Toilet Day aims to not only bring issues of inadequate sanitation and its impact on development into global spheres of discussion, but to also actively break down sanitation-based barriers to female empowerment particularly. The ideal goal would be for this relatively new national day of toilet awareness to become unnecessary in the future, because adequate sanitation will be accessible all over the world. For the next few years, it should be a faux pas for a geography student to be uninformed about World Toilet Day, but in an ideal future, the only place for World Toilet Day is in the history books.