It’s World Toilet Day!
World
toilet day is about raising awareness about the importance of sanitation to
health, education and economic productivity. 2.4 billion people around the
world live without toilets. In the lecture this week, we discussed sanitation
in urban areas, looking specifically at community toilets built and ran by
community members. It really highlighted the role the community in create changes
in the urban settlements.
Toilet facilities
in slums are perceived to be ill maintained and lacking adequate water supply.
Slum in general are portrayed as dirty, poor spaces. Majority of the examples
portrayed on popular media illustrate this. One well-known example in Slum-dog
millionaire, particularly the toilet scene when young Jamal is in a make-shift
wooden toilet with a hole that jumps into a pile of shit.
However, such
perceptions of the urban poor cannot be generalised to the whole global urban
slum population. In fact, Dharavi, where the movie is filmed, makes over $600
million a year through its small and medium sized workshops and factories (Yardley, 2001).
This entrepreneurship and innovation has also been extended to sanitation and
women play an important role in this.
Over the
last 20 years, Mahila Milan have built 6, 952 community toilet blocks for
350,000 people with the help of the Slum Dwellers Association (Patel, 2015).
Mahila Milan is a ‘network of poor women's collectives that manage credit and
savings activities in their communities’ (SPARC, 2014). The group provides
loans for income generation projects, fund community improvement schemes (such
as sanitation provisions) and importantly provide a support system for the
women (Patel, 2004). The example of Mahila Milan shows the ability to mobilise
and create change within their communities.
the point you made about the role of the community while creating changes in the urban settlements seems very interesting.If we focus on Africa`s case what do you think can be done whithin the community to improve sanitation conditions if we take into account the fact that the topic of toilets is not frequently discussed + the fact that not all African governments are investing time and money on this topic ?
ReplyDeleteHey Mboji,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment. In Tatiana lecture, she spoke the role of the community in improving urban sanitation in Africa. One of the things that can be done is community toilets built with private or local funding. The only issue with community toilets is maintenance. This is when social entreprenuirship such as IKO toilets come in. IKO toilets community toilets that are funded by shops built into the structures of the IKO toilets.