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A 2010 study by Unicef established that 50 percent of our rural population does not have toilets.
With at least 67 percent of our 13 million national population, or 8,7 million living in rural areas, roughly 4,3 million of us do not have this facility, according to Unicef.
A more recent survey by ZimStat gives a sharply smaller figure of those among us lacking a toilet. The 2012 Census Report says the number stands at 1,6 million people. Without a toilet, people resort to open defecation and urination.
It’s pointless discussing whose research between the two is a better reflection of the situation, but the point is that millions of us, particularly in rural areas do not have the decency of a latrine.
Both do not give historical figures of how the situation was, say 20 years ago, but we feel that we have regressed substantially over the past two decades when it comes to water and sanitation wellbeing.
There was a time when the Blair toilet was in every rural home. Now we have fewer because of declining investment in sanitation at government and household levels.
Public investment has declined in sympathy with the economic decline and the concomitant fall in donor funding. At a household level, many in rural areas depend largely on proceeds from agriculture, but have had recurrent bad seasons since 2000. A respite only came this year. A family struggling to put food on the table will not trouble itself putting in place infrastructure to dispose of it, when eaten!
But we have paid a heavy price for that. Between January and March 2012, the country recorded some 3,000 cases of typhoid, a disease that is transmitted through ingestion of food or water contaminated with the faeces of an infected person. In 2008, some 100,000 cholera cases were recorded, and dozens of fatalities. Cholera, like typhoid is caused by poor sanitation and water infrastructure.
That is about it with regards to direct health implications.
There are also the aesthetic factors — the air gets polluted and the ground as well. In addition, there is the embarrassment that comes with squatting behind a bush with the risk of being spotted by someone as one performs the most private of all human acts. It is indecent and primitive; we must say, but also has health implications.
The once ubiquitous Blair latrine must return. It is the only technology that can deliver a toilet for rural people. Designed by a local researcher, Dr Peter Morgan with funding from the Blair Research Institute in the 1970s, the toilet was deployed in the 1980s to improve sanitation in rural areas. At least 500,000 were built and the ground-breaking technology was soon exported to many African countries.
It is designed for rural areas where space is abundant but running water unavailable. It is a toilet, but can be a bathroom too. It is easy and cheap to build and maintain.
Some half a million were built during the accelerated phase, but with time, many of them collapsed or filled up. The dry technology cannot be used for ever, only 10 years or so unlike the flush or water-borne system which can be used for 50 years plus.
Going forward, there has to be a sustained development and maintenance of the infrastructure for us to improve our rankings in terms of provision of safe sanitation to as many people as possible. A new rollout of the programme must acknowledge these two key shortcomings of the Blair technology – the caving-ins and filling up – and find ways of going around them.
Septic tanks, common in low-density urban homes fill up after some time and have to be emptied for them to be hygienically used again. The same can be applied to the latrine. This might involve modest adjustments on the original by digging a secondary pit a few centimetres from the primary one, linked through a pipe the size of standard sewage pipes. When the primary pit fills up to certain level, it automatically empties into the secondary one. This way, if the superstructure is strong and the primary pit as well, the Blair toilet can have a longer lifespan, thus scarce resources are saved.
We cannot ignore the fact that the government has a leading role to play in this investment. Development partners, who must take credit for the initial coverage of the immediate post-independence era, can contribute too. But the bigger responsibility rests with the individual person, or household. They must be encouraged to invest in their own health and public decency.
The bush toilet is uncivilised; the diseases it can cause are long extinct elsewhere. Zimbabwe is better than this.
Online Reporter