Timor celebrates World Toilet Day

A few weeks back it was World Toilet Day (Loron Mundial Sintina). Incidentally, I started work at WaterAid on that day back in 2007, so it also marked 3 years service for me. As you can imagine, WaterAid Timor Leste was pretty busy on the day. Most of the team were in Liquiça district to support a village to declare itself Open Defecation Free (ODF), which is a key element of the CLTS approach I mentioned in this post.

An ODF declaration is an important milestone in a village’s commitment to sanitation. It is a clear public statement, complete with signboard, that “practising open defecation” (apologies for jargon, it basically means crapping in the woods) is no longer acceptable and everyone is now using a toilet, however basic. The problem, of course, is how to get people to progress from the most basic toilet to something more durable. For more info on the event, I suggest you read this article on the WaterAid Australia website by my colleague Jose Seixas.

So, most of the team were down in Liquiça, but Jose, Tofik and myself were in Dili attending the National Toilet Awards. This excellent event was organised by the Ministry of Infrastructure and BESIK (the AusAid-funded programme supporting the water supply and sanitation directorate of the Ministry). They had  mustered NGOs and private sector organisations involved in sanitation marketing from across the whole of Timor. The Vice Minister of Health was in attendance to inspect the various designs, giving some political weight to the proceedings.

Most people had the basic moulded cement pans, though prices ranged from $3-5 due to different business models and material availability. There were also some other innovative designs on show. WaterAid had supported Januario (mentioned in this post) to attend, and he brought along a few examples of a simple latrine made from a PVC pipe, and ended up winning a prize for it, which was great. The picture above shows him with part of his display. PVC is currently quite expensive here as it's imported, but prices for many materials are coming down at the moment.

These awards are great for generating interest around sanitation marketing, rewarding those entrepreneurs with good ideas, encouraging them to stick with the business and innovate more. Hopefully it will become an annual fixture. A video was made, and if it becomes available online, I’ll link to it.

I was particularly taken by the exposition of the soap-making activities supported by the Japanese NGO AFMET, who work out in Lospalos. They are helping communities produce high-quality soap made mostly from local materials like coconut oil. Their soap is also available in shops in Dili, so I’ve been using it myself. Hygiene promotion is the most cost-effective health intervention available, but hand-washing only forms a proper disease transmission barrier when soap is used. I think AFMET’s scheme is great and I’m going to try and do a full blogpost on it another time – you can read about it on the second page of this PDF.

Happy belated World Toilet Day!

Making toilets desirable but also affordable for the poor

There is consensus in the sanitation sector that in countries with low access to sanitation, an absolute policy priority is creating demand for toilets. Giving people free or heavily subsidised toilets has repeatedly been shown to fail. This is because if people do not have genuine ownership of its construction, and if they are not adequately taught why sanitation is beneficial, they may not use their shiny new toilet (or may use it for something else, like a store-room…).

Many people argue persuasively that there is still place for some subsidies, particularly for the extreme poor, but that is a discussion for another day. So, creating demand is the key, and zero-subsidy approaches like Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS, see link here) have been proven to create demand effectively in Timor-Leste. But what about supply? It is no good creating lots of demand for sanitation if there is nowhere for people to buy the necessary parts. A lot of attention has therefore recently been given to the idea of ‘sanitation marketing’. This is the concept of treating sanitation as a product to be made attractive and sold by the private sector, meaning anyone who can make adequate parts. The approach involves creating demand through modern marketing techniques, but also ensuring a sustainable supply through support to small-scale sanitation masons.

The most basic pit latrines are essentially free, because most parts can be made from wood and stones which are both easily available. But these materials do not produce a good product which will last much longer than a year. Simple pit latrines can also smell. In short, whilst simple pit latrines are a crucial first step on the ‘sanitation ladder’ they are simply not desirable. People who aspire to modernity and development want a proper toilet which does not smell, but this requires more complex technology, which of course costs money.

Generally, people in Timor-Leste equate a ‘proper’ toilet with porcelain pour-flush pans imported from Indonesia. But these are expensive, and can cost up to $15 in Dili, which doesn’t include the cost of getting them to the rural areas where most people without sanitation live. This is simply unaffordable when half of the population here live on less than $1.25 a day. So how to bridge the gap between a wooden shack with a hole, and an imported porcelain pour-flush pan?

The answer is to build local sanitation markets; training masons to produce products which people want, at an affordable price. WaterAid has recently been investing ‘start-up’ capital in sanitation masons in Liquiça district, such as the roadside sanitation shop in the photo above. The people who run this shop have a furniture business alongside their sanitation shop. In their shop, they sell the moulded cement pans (as shown in the picture) for $5 each, and make a decent profit on each one which creates an incentive to do marketing across the community to get more people to buy them.

It’s early days, but they’ve sold 40 or so in the last few months, and Oxfam recently got Januario, the entrepreneur, to train some other masons in another district. I’ll write a longer post on Januario’s shop in a few weeks