SaniFaso: a learning sanitation project in Burkina Faso

The SaniFaso project aims to eradicate open defecation in 12 partnering communes (the lowest level of administrative division) in Burkina Faso.

The four-year rural sanitation project, which started in December 2010, will  construct 16,000 latrines, train local masons and carry out hygiene promotion campaigns.

The European Commission is co-funding this 3 million Euro project. The implementing agencies are the French NGO Eau-Vive, in association with WaterAid Burkina Faso, Helvetas, GIZ/PEA and IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre.

During AfricaSan 3 conference in July 2011, SaniFaso released a project video explaining why and how it is a learning project.

For more about SaniFaso see

• an article IRC’s role in the project at www.irc.nl/page/62023
• a Powerpoint presentation and a project profile (both in French)

Webinar: Investigating Long-term Sustainability of Rural Sanitation in Bangladesh, Thursday, 21 July 2011

This webinar presentation is based on findings from a Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) study of 50 local governments that were declared 100% sanitized/open defecation free almost five years ago. Researchers found that almost 90 percent of households in the areas studied have sustained use of a latrine that adequately confines feces, but that hygienic maintenance is relatively poor.

Date: Thursday, July 21, 2011, 8:30-10:00 EST/ 13:30-15:00 GMT
Venue: Virtual, via AdobeConnect, Click ‘Enter as a Guest’, Type your full name and click ‘Enter Room’

To learn about the WSP study,  see the full Technical Report  or Research Brief.

For more information about the seminar read see the full announcement

The Toilet Named Nigeria

In his latest column, government critic and Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity College (USA) Okey Ndibe, voices his disgust at the practice of open defecation in his homeland Nigeria.

If you want to gauge how badly Nigerians have been animalized, then pay attention to how, and where, many of them defecate. Just recently, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that 33 million Nigerians have no access to decent toilets. As a consequence, said the report, these citizens of Africa’s most populous nation answer the call of nature in the open.

Is it really only 33 million Nigerians? One is afraid that here’s one occasion when statisticians have pegged the figure too low. Nigeria – as I wrote three years ago – may be described as one vast toilet. Anybody who has traveled from Lagos to Onitsha by road knows that there isn’t one single rest area with toilet facilities along the route. At stops in Ore or Benin City, pressed passengers must hurry off into the brushes, gingerly skating around others’ feces, in order to relieve themselves.

India, Mumbai: tackling open defecation in Dharavi

The municipal corporation of Mumbai (BMC) is finally taking action, after seven years, to stop Dharavi slum dwellers from using the Maharashtra Nature Park Society (MNPS) footpath as an open toilet.

Despite having a toilet in the vicinity, locals would defecate there early in the morning to save money. BMC sanitation workers would not turn up for days at a time to clean up the mess.

“The slums are on the opposite side of the park, while the toilet is near the park. There are many toilets constructed near the slums, but they don’t want to pay and use them,” said Avinash Kubal, director, MNPS. [...] “This is a VIP road, and is used for commuting to airport and other cities. The sight of people and children defecating on the street is not very pleasant”.

Sanitation in Dharavi. Photo: India in Images

Indonesia, NTT: latrine “contracts” to fight open defecation

Local officials in a district in East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) province are trying out social “contracts” to encourage villagers to build and use latrines. So far five families in the province’s Timor Tengah Selatan District have signed such a contract, which is countersigned by representatives of three levels of government.

Even though 80% of households in the district have latrines, less than half of them are used, according to local officials. Open defecation is common and people don’t wash their hands.

When asked if there were penalties or fines for people who broke a “contract”, officials said shame is a “heavy price to pay in village settings and enforcement was not a concern”.

The 2010 national health survey (RISKESDAS) revealed that 21.6% of people in NTT Province practice open defecation, compared to 17.2% for the whole of Indonesia. Surprisingly though, the survey showed that people in Indonesia have access to safe sanitation (55%) than to improved drinking water (45.1% nationally and only 25.9% in the capital Jakarta). The survey report states that there is a decrease in the level of household access to improved drinking water sources, especially in urban areas.”

Source: IRIN, 22 March 2011 ; IRIN, 03 March 201

WASHCost reveals higher capital costs for sanitation than water, and high expenditure on soap

Most sanitation costs in rural and peri-urban areas are borne by households and when these are taken into account, the per capita costs are actually higher than those for water. State expenditure on capital maintenance, operation and maintenance, and direct and indirect support costs for sanitation is minimal in all four research countries of the WASHCost project. Households in Africa are spending surprisingly high amounts on soap. These are some of the findings that were presented at the IRC Symposium in The Hague on 16-18 November 2010.

The WASHCost project is working with partners in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mozambique and in the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh to collect and analyse cost data for water and sanitation services in rural and peri-urban areas. The overall aim is to build better cost data into country systems to increase the quality of services, especially targeting issues of poverty, equity and cost-effectiveness.

The 26 metre “Shitting Man”

Dutch residents have nicknamed Antony Gormley's sculpture as "the shitting man". Photo: Victor Arnolds/NRC

Has a monument to open defecation been erected in The Netherlands? You might think so after Dutch residents christened Antony Gormley’s 26 metre high monumental sculpture “de poepende man” or the “shitting man”.

The real name of the giant crouching man overlooking the Dutch Markermeer lake is “Exposure”. Weighing 26 tonnes and taking six years to build, the sculpture was unveiled on 17 September 2010 in Lelystad, central Netherlands.

As one approaches it, [Gormley] explains: “The nature of the object changes. You can see it as a human form in the distance. It becomes more abstract the closer you get to it. And finally it becomes a chaotic frame through which you can look at the sky.”

[...]

The elements meet at particular nodal points – starbursts of metal – the most congested of which are at the head, throat, heart, stomach and genitals of the form. These roughly correspond to the “chakras”, or energy points, of ancient Hindu thought. “It is a re-examination of the body as an energy system, rather than as a system of bone, muscle and skin,” says Gormley.

When asked if he took offence to his sculpture’s nickname, Gormley said:

“I don’t mind that at all. [...] Having a crap is one of the most relaxing and intimate moments one has in the world.”

Read more about the sculpture in an article by Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian of 27 August 2010.

In Nepal, Shame Tactics Boost Bathroom Usage

While Pakistan is struggling with devastating flood waters, neighboring Nepal is fighting a water problem of its own: Contamination by human feces. Open defecation is so widespread in Nepal that health groups are making it a priority to change how and where people relieve themselves.

But when you have to go, you have to go. And for many people in Nepal, that often means outdoors.

“They feel that to do the open defecation in the open space or in the open air, they feel it is very much comfortable for them in the rural parts of the country,” said Roshah Raj Shrestha, who works with the U.N. Habitat in Kathmandu.

Nearly 60 percent of people in Nepal do not have toilets at home, according to Shresta. That means about 16 million people are defecating in the open.

Uganda: pupil rewarded for exposing open defecation

A 13-year-old Primary Six pupil was rewarded with sh20,000 [US$ 9] during celebrations of the Day of the African Child in Kamuli district after she told the audience that members of her family defecate in the bush.

It all started when the deputy chief administrative officer, Cornelius Kalema, said: “Most of our people have latrines. Tell me anyone here without a latrine and you will get a sh20,000 prize.”

Proscovia Bagaaga of Nawansaso Primary School in Kamuli announced her father’s name and their village and said since their latrine filled up last year, he had refused to construct another one.

Kalema praised the girl and urged her to tell her father to build a new pit-latrine or risk arrest.

Source: Tom Gwebayanga , New Vision, 20 Jun 2010

Sierra Leone: plan for sanitation rests with community

Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is not always a success. The IPS article below tells about a peri-urban community in Sierra Leone where a CLTS programme failed because the community had wrongly assumed that it would receive a subsidy to build improved latrines.

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Freetown. Lying forgotten in the bush somewhere is a sign declaring “Ogoo Farm is an open defecation-free community.”

This peri-urban community of roughly 3000 people was one of the villages where UNICEF and the Sierra Leone ministry of health implemented the pilot phase of a Community-Led Total Sanitation Programme in 2008.

The programme trains communities on the dangers of open defecation – which contaminates streams and other water sources – and mobilises action to end the practice.

]…] But the gear pushing the programme forward in Ogoo Farm, 40 kilometres from the Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, appears to have become stuck in reverse. The majority of community residents still head for a quiet spot in the bush to empty their bowels.

“The project is simply not working properly,” Bai Kabia, the Ogoo Farm headman told IPS. He explained that initially the villagers were all thrilled with the idea of keeping their village hygienic.

“The sensitisation was dramatic. We realised that the idea of using the bush and streams in our village as toilet was bad and detrimental to the health of the whole village and we agreed to start building toilets,” Kabia explained.

He said that they dug 70 pit latrines around the village, each with a screen made of tarpaulin or nylon rice bags to shield a user from view.

The toilets were not an unqualified success. Ogoo farm’s women were among the first to abandon using them.

“These makeshift toilets are not very private,” Ramatu Kamara complained. “The heat that comes up these holes are unbearable when we stoop to use them. Moreover some of us have had infections using these toilets.”

There was worse to come. “When the rains came, the tarpaulin covering was destroyed. We also discovered that the pits were unsafe as the dirt around it was collapsing because we did not use iron rods to build the pit, we used sticks and these rot during the rain,” Kabia said.

“The holes even flooded and brought up everything we had sent down in them.”

Kabia said that they invited UNICEF and the health ministry to a meeting and told them about the problems.

“We suggested that they help us build proper toilets. We have offered to make mud blocks and we want them to give us corrugated iron sheets to (make a) roof. They promised that they would source funding for that but up till now nothing has been done.”

But Thomas Amara, the acting manager of environmental health in the ministry of health and sanitation told IPS that this is not how the sanitation programme works.

“What the project does is to trigger the community to take action against open defecation. We get them to see vividly that open defecation is bad for the community as it can contaminate their water source and thus lead to diseases including diarrhoea,” said Amara.

Arnold Cole, UNICEF’s water and sanitation health specialist for Sierra Leone, confirmed that the programme does not provide any subsidy whatsoever to communities.

“We encourage self empowerment.” Cole said. UNICEF is providing finance and technical support to more than 30 NGOs and six districts authorities to take the programme of awareness and mobilisation all over the country.

Cole claimed that Ogoo Farm was an exception in a programme that is succeeding in other parts of the country; alongside the health ministry, they have identified enthusiastic locals they refer to as “natural leaders” who then go into other villages and towns and spread the message.

The health ministry’s Amara said that in some rural villages in Port Loko, Kenema and Moyamba, the programme has been embraced so fervently that by-laws against open defecation have been passed, with heavy fines for defaulters.

“They also have been ‘scaling up’, building better and permanent toilets with their own monies,” said Amara.

One difference, he noted, is that villagers in the provinces usually own the houses they live in. They are more ready to bear the cost of building improvements like toilets than those in communities close to urban areas, such as Ogoo Farm, where most residents are tenants who look to their landlords to build permanent toilets.

Ogoo Farm headman Bai Kabia agreed, “They do not want to take responsibility for anything and as soon as they found out the project is being facilitated by NGOs – especially big organisations like UNICEF – they thought that there should be money for everything.”

And so it was that the “open defecation-free” sign was uprooted just two months after it was planted. “We do not want to live a lie, (open defecation) is still here,” the village headman sighed.

However Kabia revealed that the Farmers’ Association in their community has promised to build proper public toilets in different locations in the Community as part of their social responsibility.

The headman said he is also encouraging the community people, tenants as well as landlords to build toilets for their houses and that new house constructions will not be approved if the plan does not include toilet construction.

Source: Mohamed Fofanah, IPS, 01 Apr 2010