Starting at the bottom - Africa needs better toilets: report

By Kate Thomas and Shabtai Gold Nov 17, 2011, 22:02 GMT

Monrovia/Johannesburg - Colourful billboards lining the roads outside Sierra Leone's capital Freetown tell villagers: 'Stop Running Stomach,' (using the local term for diarrhea.) 'Use pit latrines.'

In Sierra Leone and other hot, humid countries of West Africa, toilet-building initiatives are sometimes met with indifference.

'At first I didn't see why we needed them,' said 55-year-old Alfred Koroma, who is the chief of a village outside the capital. 'There is lots of land around the village and we have trees and a small stream.'

But word of the success of a latrine-building project in the next village reached him. After speaking with a nurse there he was convinced that 'there is a relationship between using latrines and a healthy stomach.'

Ahead of World Toilet Day, to be marked on Saturday, the organization Water Aid has warned in a new report that Africa risks seeing more children die each year from easily-transmitted diseases if governments do not invest in basic infrastructure.

'The lack of access to water and sanitation is the primary cause of diarrhea, which is biggest killer of children in Africa,' said John Garret at Water Aid.

According to the new report Garret helped author, the shortfall in water and sanitation services costs sub-Saharan African countries around 5 per cent of their GDP each year - which amounted to about 47.7 billion dollars in 2009.

This staggering sum is slightly higher than all foreign development aid dispersed annually in those countries.

Building latrines also has a significant effect on West Africa's schools.

'We had lots of girl children leaving school around the age of 12 or 13,' Joao Djalo, a headmaster in the town of Bafata, Guinea-Bissau, told dpa.

'Some of the girls were dropping out of school at the onset of menstruation,' he added. 'Building latrines has not been a perfect solution, but we think it has helped keep numbers up.'

By keeping girls in school, African countries stand a better chance of ending the dire poverty often experienced in rural villages and overcrowded slums.

'During the industrial revolution there was substantial investment in water and sanitation in Britain and Western Europe,' Garret from Water Aid said in an interview.

He noted that leaders at the time felt the need to tackle infectious diseases. Today's newly emerging economies are seeing things in the similar light and investing to fight the scourge of preventable illness, which is a drain on health care budgets.

'Asian economies, especially the Asian tigers, have to a large extent solved their water and sanitation issue and the health impact is substantial. And it helps their economic progress,' he said.

In South Africa, the continent's wealthiest country, toilets were a key factor in local elections this year, after it emerged that some municipalities had built communal toilets in townships without a shelter.

The often destitute residents of the slums carry around blankets so they can cover themselves while using the latrines. Many residents pledged to vote for the politicians likely to provide them with more dignified options.

Poorer African nations have even less to work with. In the slums outside of Nairobi, most people still use so-called 'flying toilets,' which are not latrines at all.

Instead, people defecate into plastic bags and then toss it far away from their homes. Quite often in the cramped slum the package lands in the street or in someone else's shack. It is common to see the bags resting on rooftops.

When the bags break the contents are released to mix with the rain water on the mud alleys of slums like Kibera, the largest informal settlement in Africa.

More than 800,000 people are packed onto the side of a hill outside Nairobi, with the population density of Kibera estimated to be 30 times that of Manhattan.

The few toilet blocks that do exist in Kibera are often owned by private people who charge a fee for their usage. And they can be dangerous places.

'Many blocks are often closed by evening time as there are reports of muggings and rapes,' wrote academics in a paper this year published by the British Institution of Civil Engineers. The research also noted the hardships in accessing clean water in the slum.

On a side alley in Kibera, a young man named Frankie watched as a woman bent over to collect water slowly dripping from a black plastic tank that services several families.

'It is really hard work,' the 21-year-old man says in sympathy.

The woman finally loaded the bucket onto her head and then, carefully not to trip in the muddy alleys, she walked towards her shack. Beneath her feet were dozens of slippery plastic bags, many of them 'flying toilets.'

Water Aid says women and children often suffer most as they are responsible for bringing water home.

'The time taken for fetching water can reach two or three hours,' Garret says, pointing out that this inefficiency too hampers African economic growth.