On the blog

Monday 28 February 2011

The Case of the Disappearing Toilets


Earlier this month, the BBC reported that a Manchester council is shutting 18 public toilets in the area, leaving only one for public convenience. So if you can’t make it all the way to that one, you better hold it in!

Manchester City council is not alone. The British Toilet Association, an organisation that campaigns for better public toilets, estimates that at least 1000 public toilets will be closed in the next year. This comes on top of a 40 percent decline in public conveniences over the last 10 years.

The BBC article reads that in recent decades, public toilets have become “run down, unloved, targeted by vandals and increasingly prone to closure by councils looking for cuts”.

As public toilets in the UK become an increasingly rare commodity, here at Toilet Twinning we’re reminded of the daily search many in the developing world have for somewhere safe and private to go to the toilet.

2.6 billion people around the world, including communities in Burundi and Haiti, have no adequate toilet between them at all. Not in their homes, in their schools, let alone on a public road.

Women in particular are left with no choice but to squat in the bushes, giving new meaning to ‘public toilets’, leaving them vulnerable to dangers such as snake bites and even rape. Young women may not be able to go to school for large parts of the year because the schools have no toilets or because they have to collect water.

A lack of toilets also leads to easily preventable disease for many – bad sanitation is one of the world’s biggest killers. Every minute, three children under the age of five die because of dirty water and poor sanitation.

So it may be getting increasingly harder to find a toilet when you’re out on the High Street at the weekend, but for one in three people in other parts of the world, this is a 24/7 issue.

By linking your loo with a toilet in Africa with Toilet Twinning, you'll help provide clean water and effective sanitation to some of the world's poorest communities.

Get ‘engaged’ and twin a toilet today!

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