The WASH web

  My last blog will be continuing on the theme of toilets – offering some hope for the future of toilets in informal settlements in the global south. The film Slumdog Millionaire perfectly captured the paradox of slum life – the harsh conditions that people are living in, but also the potential of entrepreneurialism to generate income. This paradox is also seen in Mathare, an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya (as shown in Figure 1).   Figure 1: Alleyway in a slum in Mathare, Nairobi In Mathare, the toilet is being reinvented – not just on a public health imperative, but as a business opportunity (‘A toilet is not just a toilet’). At ‘Number 10’ neighbourhood, a shared toilet (which has a fee to use) is managed by a local youth group , generating income for themselves as well as other avenues – such as a mobile banking kiosk and water point, which are next to the toilet. In this way, urban sanitation is linked to urban economies and infrastructures. Ikotoilet (as ...

This blog will delve further ‘into’ something that I have touched on in my other blogs – the toilet – of which discussions of sanitation have been mobilised around. While I was watching Slumdog Millionaire , I started to understand the scale of the sanitation crisis in informal settlements in the global south. From the hanging latrines – which can pollute waterways and often require payment, to open defecation, which thousands of slum residents have to navigate every day. In this setting, a toilet is a symbol of vulnerability and urban precarity . In 2020, 3.6 billion people lacked safely managed sanitation, including 494 million practicing open defecation . As Figure 1 shows, Sub-Saharan Africa has higher rates of open defecation, compared to the rest of the world, and Madagascar has huge inequalities in the levels of open defecation within the country – from rural to poor areas, richer to poorer. Not only should the elimination of open defecation focus on the poorest and rural area...