Nearly half of the world’s population still live without safely managed sanitation services. Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) initiatives reach beyond clean drinking water and plumbing. It may surprise you to realize that something as simple as a properly maintained latrine or bathroom can significantly improve a community’s overall quality of life.
Every Nov. 19, we observe World Toilet Day to bring awareness to this issue and reduce the amount of people that are living without access to safe toilets. As you’ll see in the stories below, clean toilets reduce disease, increase gender equality, and accelerate education.
Meet the folks across five countries whose lives improved by Global Impact charities providing WASH services and infrastructure:
Water For People
📍Bolivia
Meet Pablo
For the first 32 years of Pablo’s life, he didn’t have a bathroom. When K’aspi Cancha’s new water system was being constructed by the district government and Water For People, Pablo attended a workshop about the importance of hygiene and sanitation.
Challenge
“In the workshops, they told about waterborne illnesses and contamination of water supplies,” says Pablo. “They told us, ‘If you are going to have water, you should construct your bathrooms and have showers, toilets, and sinks.”
Solution
Pablo left the workshops realizing he wanted to improve his family’s life. He wanted his sons to have what he never had as a child — a decent bathroom. Pablo immediately got to work.
“I am not a mason, but I constructed the bathroom myself,” says Pablo. “Now we can shower with hot water before bed and take care of our hygiene. Now, my house is complete, and it feels like we live in the city!” Pablo said his sons couldn’t believe it.
The new bathroom changed Pablo’s life so dramatically that he took it upon himself to promote sanitation to the town’s 54 families. There are currently seven additional families that are already building bathrooms, and Pablo’s happy to help them out.
“Now, my life lacks nothing,” says Pablo.
WaterAid
📍Tanzania
Meet Rashid
In the district of Geita, Kalunde Rashid gave birth to her second child at Chikobe Health Center.
Challenge
Some health care facilities don’t have water and ask pregnant women to bring it with them when they give birth. If the nearest water source to the hospital is unsafe, or patients are unable to bring water with them, they must buy it from commercial vendors at inflated prices.
“Mum is here taking care of me. She is old and could not go to collect water down the valley, so we had to buy two buckets,” says Kalunde. During delivery, Kalunde bled so much that all the water was used for cleaning the delivery room. There was no water left for bathing.
“Bacterial infections and sepsis are common in babies and mothers,” says Dolgan Joseph, a nurse who has worked at Chikobe for six years. “If we can get water and electricity here, my work will be easy. Once the hospital environment is clean, it minimizes the rates of infection.”
Solution
WaterAid brought clean water and infection control measures to hospitals throughout the district. Today, the number of women choosing to give birth at health centers has doubled. Zero cases of maternal sepsis were reported after these interventions, compared to 19 cases before the arrival of clean water.
Plan International USA
📍Uganda
Meet Shadia
Thirteen-year-old Shadia loves attending school and hates to miss it.
Challenge
At Shadia’s school, the bathroom was shared with boys and didn’t have any privacy. When she was on her period, she had to go home and miss school because there was nowhere to change her menstrual products.
Solution
Plan International built a new latrine at the school with a changing room that allows Shadia and the other girls in her class to have privacy from the boys. “The new one is beneficial to me. I can change my sanitary pads, refresh, and go back to class,” she says. Now, she doesn’t have to miss any school. The new latrine is helping students have a stronger education.
Amref Health Africa
📍Malawi
Meet Tereza and Frank
Tereza has been a teacher at the Mzenene Early Childhood Development preschool in the Zomba District since 2018 and five-year-old Frank has attended the center for a year. For them, education is critical to breaking the cycle of poverty.
Challenge
Many early childhood centers still lack access to safe water and sanitation facilities. At this preschool, over 100 children under the age of 5 learn, play, and start their first educational steps. Having only one pit latrine with no water shared between adults, boys, and girls, sanitation and hygiene became a big problem.
When a school does not have sanitation facilities, even a simple latrine, children defecate in the open or miss class to find a toilet. This affects attendance and contributes to the spread of diseases in the area.
Solution
Fortunately, Amref Health Africa installed new toilets for adults and students. With Amref Health Africa’s new borehole and restrooms, students no longer have to leave class in search of drinking water, teachers can have better control of their classrooms, and most importantly, more kids like Frank can learn letters, numbers, and everything in between, comfortably.
Frank’s teacher is happy with his progress and he will be joining a new class next year. “He’s able to spell his name and write numbers,” she remarks. His mother is happy because it’s not just supporting the center; the family can also get water to use back home.
Living Water International
📍Sierra Leone
Meet Mr. Koroma
Mr. Koroma, a local farmer in the Gbongeh community, spent most of his life unaware of the dangers posed by open defecation.
Challenge
After traveling to more urban areas in his district, he became one of the few in his community to dig a toilet in his home. However, he did not know how to maintain it, and it became overused and unhygienic over the years.
Solution
One day he happened upon another community that Living Water Sierra Leone was training about the dangers of open defecation and the benefits of living in a clean and healthy environment. He was so excited that he immediately became a messenger of hygiene reform in his own community. He refurbished his own latrine in accordance with Living Water’s standards and welcomed other community members to use it. He was soon viewed as a leader and organizer in his community.
He invited Living Water Sierra Leone to visit his community to help share the transformative information he had learned with other community members. Living Water visited the community to teach residents about sanitation and hygiene and many others began to install their own latrines.
Mr. Koroma was amazed by what had been accomplished in his community. He rejoiced and exclaimed, “What a blessing…your hygiene education and intervention transformed my entire community!”
It seems like a no-brainer that something as essential as a clean toilet can improve so many futures. However, at the current rate of progress, 3 billion people will still be living without safe toilets in 2030. Unless the rate of infrastructure improvements increases, WASH-related Sustainable Development Goals will not be met.
You can support the work that Global Impact charities are doing to install and maintain safe bathrooms around the world:
- Give at work to a clean water charity
- Support the Clean Water Fund with your workplace gift or online donation
- Host an engagement event at your office or virtual office
