Water is Life, but Sanitation is Dignity.
HAPPY WORLD TOILET DAY!
On today, 19th November, it is World Toilet Day. It is fitting then that in today’s blog post, I am moving onto sanitation issues and what is at the heart of sanitation? Toilets.
World Toilet Day was designated by the UN in 2010 to promote the issue of sanitation and toilets as a humanitarian device for development. It was to help raise the issue while attempting to remove pre-existing stigmas around going to the toilet.The toilet has since become a major object of development, for example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's competition to 'reinvent the toilet'. WaSH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) has been firmly molded into the development agenda over the last decade or more. In the 2000-2015 Millennium Development Goals did not have a separately specified goal for sanitation; it was included as a subset under Millennium Development Goal 7, 'Ensure environmental sustainability' - Target 7C: By 2015, halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation' (WHO, 2018).The Sustainable Development Goals are praised as being more intersectional than the MDGs in order to address their previous shortcomings (Nunes et. al. 2016; Kumar et. al., 2016; Pommell et. al., 2018).
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| SDG 6 'Clean Water & Sanitation', ICE, 2018 |
If you click into the World Toilet Day website one of the first things it states is that "The world is not on track to meet SDG 6" as currently 4.5 billion people worldwide lack access to safe toilet facilities and open defecation is still a common practise for 892 million (UN, 2018). Where there is no toilet or an inadequate, un-maintained or broken-down toilet, girls and women suffer the consequences more acutely. In my last post, I spoke about the issue of toilets, or lack thereof, to personal safety as when women and girls have to go to the toilet out in the open, they, not only, are in more danger of harassment and attack but having to urinate, defecate or attend to their periods out in the open makes women susceptible to urinary tract infections and other health issues (Schmitt et. al., 2018, Das, 2017).
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| MHD, 2018 |
A period friendly toilet needs:
- Toilet
- Toilet paper
- Running water/sink for handwashing
- Disposal facility i.e. a bin
- Privacy- usually a lockable door
- Lighting
- Access to sanitary pads or tampons
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| UNICEF, WHO & UNESCO quote in Dignity Dreams, n.d. |
World Toilet Day was used to help move on stigma around going to the toilet in order to implement policies and focus the Development agenda within government and non-government bodies towards dirtier, less appealing subjects. It is important that dirty topics have been put on the agenda over the last 10-20 years (Longhurst, 1997: 494) and that the 'squeamishness' and taboo around dirty subjects is gradually being removed (Black & Fawcett, 2008; Jewitt, 2011). While not the most glamorous subject in the world, there have been a growing crop of researchers and NGOs dealing with shit but menstruation has not yet been de-stigmatised in the same way (Jewitt & Ryley, 2014). MHM has previously been overlooked within both health and other developmental and research sectors mostly due to the fact there are still many social, cultural and religious restrictions around menstruation (Sommers & Sahin, 2013; Kaur, 2018). As with toilets, there is now a day designated to Menstrual Hygiene on May, 28th. This was initiated by WaSH United in 2014/15 but has only really come to be globally recognized over the last 2-3 years and has consistently become more popular and broken records set by MHDay year upon year. Although, fairly recent, it is an important move that menstruation issues are beginning to take center stage.
MHDay posted this video on their webpage and facebook today to highlight the importance of toilets for menstruating girls on World Toilet Day.
Despite being set in India, much of the same issues around toilet access and stigma/embarrassment arise in many contexts and across the African continent. This post is entitled 'Water is life, but sanitation is dignity'; I began my blog with 'water is life' and so thought it fitting as I move onto sanitation to begin with a continuation of this quote. “Water is life, but sanitation is dignity”, was used in 2009 by the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Programme moderator to open a discussion on management of Nairobi's toilets (Thieme, 2015). Sanitation, however, is more than toilets and part of providing 'clean water and sanitation for all' (SDG6) is giving women the dignity of privacy and adequate toilet facilities to manage their menstrual cycles. This is beginning to be addressed in development planning but needs to included more widely in policy and development goals.
Great blog. enjoyed reading so far. You have said that 'menstruation issues are taking center stage'. Is this in Africa or in general? How and do you think this is ddown to a generational change/open-ness/liberalization of society?
ReplyDeleteGood question! I do think society is more willing to talk about 'dirty' topics (see Longhurst, 1997 'dirty topics are not on the agenda' or any of Jewitt's work on sanitation) like menstruation but I also think mind-sets are changing and stigma around periods is decreasing or at least being highlighted (Plan International/UK's have complied really interesting and extensive recent studies on this -https://plan-uk.org/media-centre/plan-international-uks-research-on-period-poverty-and-stigma). Although mainly included in health aspects of development practitioners, policy makers and NGOs are increasingly looking at menstrual issues in other ways like the perforation of 'period poverty' in the UK and much of this is initiated/led by younger generations of women.
DeleteHi, on this World Water day I had a look around the design and focus that was chosen for 2018. The theme was decorative with pretty exotic plants and birds, following the theme of 'Nature for Water' that looks at how we can use nature to overcome the water challenges of the 21st century (http://www.un.org/en/events/waterday/). In my opinion, and after my research for my Water and Gender blog, I found this 'pretty' theme and focus on nature detracting from the undignified realities of many women and whole communities that lack water provisions including sanitation. So, focusing on 'nature' was not only superficial but focusing on something unneeded as the basics have been dealt with - far from it. How do you feel about this theme and do you believe it holds any truths or help for Women and Gender, or not?
ReplyDeleteHey Elizabeth! Thanks for the really great question. Yeah I did see this! World Toilet Day also had a similar theme to World Water Day under the theme- 'Nature is calling...' (www.un.org/en/events/toiletday/). I had even considered using a 'nature' theme for this post but to be honest I didn't think it added anything to my blog for the very reasons you suggest in your comment. I thought it would be hypocritical of me to use this 'pretty' theme with imagery that focused on birds and flowers, when in my blogs I wanted to look at some of the harsher realities of water for women like the costs of water collection, vulnerability in sanitation contexts and menstrual hygiene management! These are very real issues women face everyday that are continually under-researched.
DeleteHowever outside of the context of gender I do think the link the UN makes on World Water Day and World Toilet Day is an interesting one as we tend to focus on sanitation as only from the human perspective and it isn't usually an issue I would link with environmental degradation or ecosystem contamination. For example this quote from the UN page (www.un.org/en/events/toiletday/) “When nature calls, we need a toilet. But, billions of people don’t have one. This means human faeces, on a massive scale, are not being captured or treated – contaminating the water and soil that sustain human life. We are turning our environment into an open sewer. We must build toilets and sanitation systems that work in harmony with ecosystems.”
Hey Bronwen - great, informative post on a very current and important issue across many fields. Coming from a human rights stance, this is a very interesting area of development and an important issue in the realisation of human rights. It is also important to note that access to these basic human needs promote not only human dignity but fulfill human rights obligations.
ReplyDeleteOn 28 July 2010, with Resolution 64/292, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognised the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realisation of all human rights. Looking forward to future posts!
Hey! Thanks for your comment. I hadn't thought about the link to Human Rights! 2010 was definitely a significant year for the recognition of water and sanitation within policy and development especially across the UN. I also think one day soon menstruation issues are going to taken into account in human rights, the SDGs and similar development policy as momentum has increased recently especially in the UK regarding menstrual issues and the true effect they have on women - (recently the pink protest have launched a legal case for the recognition of period poverty) and this will only increase with the inclusion of more women at a leadership level.
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