Toilets Save Lives: Call for Teaching Tools

Remember that scene from Slumdog Millionaire? That’s what most people in developing country slums have as toilets. Yet at the same time there are thousands of abandoned or barely used household toilets in India and in Africa. Abandoned because they are poorly built, because of a lack of water, or for a lack of maintenance or demand.

Many low-cost toilets become deadly points of environmental contamination. So there is a real need to make sure we build QUALITY toilets – which will be used and appreciated en masse – while working towards the MDG of improving access to safe sanitation.

So what’s the problem? There are plenty of books on sanitation in the market. There’s plenty of information on the internet on sanitation. There are costly workshops that policy makers can attend to learn about this subject, as well as simpler workshops given to masons and field supervisors under less glamorous settings.

There are plenty of training programmes, but what is retained of such programmes? We simply don’t know! The problem is there are no tools to assess people’s knowledge of sanitation.

Representing UNU-MERIT (NL) and FIN (India), I aim to create a tool that will help people who are driving sanitation efforts work out what their team members know or don’t know – and how to rectify this.

In partnership with Gita Balakrishnan of ETHOS (India) and Valentin Post of WASTE (NL), I’m organizing a call for contributions to a ‘Sanitation Question-Answer Bank’ under the aegis of the FINISH programme for sanitation coverage in India.

What does this call for contributions to Sanitation Question-Answer Bank mean? It means if you can think of an interesting question (along with a photo) on how to promote safe sanitation – and can also explain the answer – we want to hear from you!

Expert judges will select 1000 winning entries, each of which will be awarded Rs 75 each (or you can contribute this to repair of toilets!). The concept paper giving detailed explanations about the contest and the answer sheet format is available at Ethos India.

All interesting entries will be acknowledged with the name of the contributor clearly mentioned. These will be compiled into an e-book and put in the creative commons – to be used by any agency teaching about sanitation or anyone who wants to test and improve their knowledge on this subject.

by Shyama Ramani, Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT. Image: Flickr / Waterdotorg (Tamil Nadu, India)

  1. Nik Baerten

    The Aalto Global Impact team (a collaboration between UNICEF & Aalto Design Factory) has been doing some inspiring work on a project in Uganda “Water, Sanitation and Hygiene” (see http://www.aaltoglobalimpact.org/projects/uganda-water-sanitation-and-hygiene and their blog at http://aaltoglobalimpact.tumblr.com ) in which they’ve designed various sanitary tools incl. toilets. Perhaps an idea to get in touch with them.
    Wishing you all the best with your project!

  2. tony

    your post did indeed remind me of the movie slumdog millionaire . In all case, I agree with you on the “low-cost toilets become deadly points of environmental contamination”. In fact, I myself, when I was younger in cambodia, we had no proper toilet and had to use the ones similar to the one in the movie. Thank you for your project.

UNU-MERIT