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Roselyne Sachiti Features Editor

Improved sanitation can reduce diarrhoeal diseases by more than a third and can significantly lessen the adverse health impact of other disorders responsible for death and disease among millions of children in developing countries.

“Some people born in families living in urban settings take sanitation issues for granted.

“Most have never experienced squatting behind a bush, constantly checking if anyone is coming as they relieve themselves.

“These are such things that some people may not take seriously when advocated for by those in need.”

These are some of the concerns by young women in Zimbabwe’s remote areas, who until recently had no access to toilets and defecated in the bush.

In Zimbabwe, while many urban households enjoy the luxury of the privacy provided by toilets, people in rural areas still practise open defecation.

It is, however, not all gloomy.

In rural areas like Zebra Village, Mtetengwe area in Beitbridge West, open defecation is fast becoming a problem of the past.

Here stands a village that tells a success story of good sanitation interventions in the province.

In this village, a sanitation action group (SAG) of seven members has been working tirelessly to ensure that most households have toilets.

Sanitation Action Groups (SAG), is a team of dedicated locally-based cadres instituted to get community buy-in and to further support community initiatives in the construction of latrines.

Only two of the 52 households are still to construct toilets and this is remarkable.

Mrs Tilivhali Moyo (45) is a SAG member and wants every member of their community to have a toilet come end of 2015.

“Our dream is to ensure that every household has a proper toilet.

“Open defecation poses a lot of health challenges and we want to see everyone in this village move away from that,” she said.

“We realised that our domestic animals are free range and they would eventually unearth and eat these faeces.

“This means when I eventually eat or try to sell my chickens, I will likely get diseases from their waste. People might also frown at buying them.”

With the cost of constructing a toilet far from the reach of many, the community and District Development Fund and other partners like the United Nations Children Fund have assisted.

It costs between US$150 and $200 to construct a proper toilet. For long, building a toilet has not been a priority for many in this dry part of Zimbabwe.

“We have also helped build a toilet for a disabled villager in Ward 6. The District Development Fund has also helped with cement and this has triggered the pace of development,” added Moyo.

Just outside each toilet is a hand washing point. Here, water is stored in a container tied onto a tree using a long rope. The rope is attached to a brick.

“It is easy to wash hands from here. You just step on a string tied to the container and out comes the water,” she said, her son demonstrating how they wash hands.

Before the SAGs and local authorities started advocating for construction of toilets, villagers in this part of the country were using unsafe methods.

“Some were going to the bush but after triggering we encouraged them to share toilets that were already there,” said Beitbridge District Co-ordinator for Water and Sanitation Mr Tinashe Ngundu.

Mr Ngundu said their target was to construct 267 toilets for vulnerable people that include child-headed families and the disabled among others.

He added that they would assist them build the toilets by providing upgradable Blair VIP toilet (uBVIP).

The Blair VIP (BVIP) toilet is a Zimbabwean invention and the forerunner of all VIP toilets. It has been a standardised piece of sanitary hardware recommended by the Government of Zimbabwe for 30+ years.

The family unit is multi-purpose and doubles as a washroom. A multi-compartment version is recommended for schools.

Mr Ngundu also said that they hope to build 24 more latrines at various schools in the district.

“As of last year, we built 16 latrines at schools and we recently got an allocation for a further 24.

“The programme is also aimed at rehabilitating school latrines. So far we have rehabilitated seven,” he said.

With such initiatives, people in this area will worry less about disease outbreak.

Inadequate disposal of human excreta and personal hygiene is associated with a range of diseases including diarrhoeal and polio and is an important determinant for stunting.

Improved sanitation can reduce diarrhoeal diseases by more than a third and can significantly lessen the adverse health impact of other disorders responsible for death and disease among millions of children in developing countries.

Millennium Development Goal Number 7C is aimed at reducing by half, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

An improved sanitation facility is defined as one that hygienically separates human excreta from human contact.

Improved sanitation facilities for excreta disposal include flush or pour flush to a piped sewer system, septic tank or pit latrine; ventilated improved pit latrine with slab and use of a composting toilet.

According to the 2014 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, about 62 percent of Zimbabwe’s population was living in households with improved sanitation facilities. Use of improved sanitation was almost universal in urban areas (98,9 percent) compared to (56,5 percent) in rural areas.

The overall open defecation was 31,7 percent. Matabeleland North Province had the highest proportion of household population with no sanitation facilities and 69,6 percent of them practised open defecation.

Thirty five percent of the household population was using an improved sanitation facility not shared with other households (MDG indicator 7,9).

About 27 percent of household members used an improved toilet facility that was public or shared with other household members.

In rural areas, 30,3 percent used a facility that was not shared with other households. Forty four percent of household members in rural areas did not have any sanitation facilities compared to 1,1 percent in urban areas.

Washing hands with water and soap reduces the risk of diarrhoea by 44 percent, an ARI by 23 percent among under fives. In the survey, hand washing facilities included tippy taps, sinks, hand-washing tanks and buckets with taps among others.

“Run to waste” is the practice of washing hands under running water from a portable container without using it again for hand washing.

The percentage of households with specific places for hand-washing where water, soap and other cleansing agents were present was 10,3 percent.

Of these, the highest was observed in Bulawayo Province (41 percent), Midlands (19,5 percent) and Harare Province (17,2 percent).

It was higher in urban areas (27,9 percent) compared to rural areas (2,6 percent) and went up with an increase in socio-economic status of the household and level of education of the head of the household.

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