Sanitation for the Urban Poor – The Women’s Perspective Part II
This series of posts focuses on the characteristics and effects of basic sanitation provision in urban informal settlements as perceived by women. Read Part 1.
As a part of my college credit requirements I decided to take a treacherous path for the Civil Engineer – a thesis research topic dabbling in the social sciences. I’ve always found the lack of social considerations in the civil engineering profession counter intuitive. To give some background: I studied Civil engineering because I genuinely like our species and want to solve all of our problems. I’m still realising that I probably won’t be able to do all that but I felt that at least, as a woman in my profession, I owed something to the women that “couldn’t”. I wanted to empower my own. This series is a chronicle of my journey and my pot of gold at the end. If you haven’t yet read Part I where I argued how important it is to be gender conscious when designing basic services. And how within the context of informal settlements more so due to the physical constraints placed on the design.
So, if the intangible aspect of sanitation is so important how do we define how women feel when they use the sanitation facilities provided to them? I decided I had to go and speak to these women.
Image courtesy of Google Earth
My devised plan quickly encountered numerous challenges. Where would I find these women? Will they understand me? Will they even be open to speak to a stranger about some of the most intimate activities of their daily lives? So I decided to enlist the help of a local organisation called Courc, that conducted enumerations for the City in these areas and also developed micro financing schemes with women living in informal settlements. They had a strong relationship with a community in Europe. No, not the continent. Europe is a “neighbourhood” of Gugulethu, one of Cape Town’s largest townships.
Europe is on a small piece of land wedged between a national highway and a cemetery. It’s located close to Cape Town International Airport, which provides a major part of the employment for Europe’s 6000 residents. To my shock, these 6000 people shared 1000 toilets.
Conducting a survey on my own would be difficult – I was a stranger to the community and did not speak their language. The majority of Europe’s residents speak Xhosa and very broken English. With the help of Courc I was able to find 5 women that would help me interview another 20. So that was our sample, small but insightful. I met with my “team” twice and explained each question of the survey to them thoroughly, during these sessions it became terribly clear that these women faced danger every time they needed to visit a toilet.
I’ll assume that most people reading this share their toilet with no more than the people living with them and don’t have to leave their house. We found that not a single dwelling had a toilet (the way the West defines it) on their premises and that on average each toilet was shared by 3 families. I realised it would be difficult for me to quantify actual criminal incidents and therefore decided to look at how the women felt. I split the questions into four categories concerning the safety of usage, accessibility, affordability and cultural acceptability of the toilets; adding an activity diary at the end where the women were supposed to describe a typical day to me and when during the day they would use the toilet. Although, the questionnaire was short, by personally engaging with the women I discovered some insightful trends.
Cultural acceptability
Image of a typical toilet in Europe, a "neighbourhood" of Gugulethu, one of Cape Town's largest townships.
It is difficult to define what exactly makes a toilet culturally acceptable. Toilets should however afford the user a certain level of privacy and dignity. What we found was that none of these boxes were ticked. During the survey I found that about half the toilet used by the respondents faced the road and that two thirds of these women preferred it if they didn’t. Similarly, over 80% of the women were bothered by the fact that people could see when they used the toilets. Another topic we discussed was the cleanliness of the toilet. Cleanliness was one of the highest concerns the women had, and instinctively the higher the number of families sharing toilets the higher are the concerns regarding cleanliness. It is difficult to allocate responsibility for keeping the toilet clean to a particular person or holding parties responsible for creating a mess. Furthermore, a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS in South Africa adds a further dynamic to the hygiene issue. Disputes often arise as HIV positive individuals are discriminated against by the people they share a toilet with, leaving both parties constantly concerned for their safety and health.
Physically accessible
My focus during the survey was to discover the reasons behind the decisions these women made regarding their toilet use. One of these decisions was how they chose when to go, and a major deciding factor was the accessibility of the toilet at a given time. Firstly, the more people shared a toilet the more inaccessible it became for any individual to use it. Women may choose to only go early in the morning before any else has gone to avoid the toilet being in use or dirty. From the activity diary we discovered that women under all circumstances avoided using the toilet at night. The obvious reason being that generally criminal activity is higher at night; but not only were women concerned about themselves when they went to use the toilets, they feared for their homes stating that there was a high prevalence of break-ins and theft. A majority of women took less than 5 minutes to reach their toilet from their homes, and their perception of threats was greatly influenced by the illumination of the path. Generally, perceptions of threats were lower if the path was lit.
Both these factors play large roles in the safety of the women when using the toilet which by and large is the most important aspect of the women’s toilet use.
Safe to use
There are many aspects regarding a woman’s safety when using the toilet. First, she is placed in a vulnerable position when using the toilet, often subject to harassment. This is enhanced by the fact that the toilets miss something as simple as an internal lock. That is anyone may enter at any time if someone is using the toilet. After hearing this fact, it was of no surprise to me that the women were petrified of being sexually abused or mugged. Surprisingly, using the way we framed the questions, women were less afraid of being raped but more afraid of being harassed when they could be seen using the toilet and the toilet faced the road. There’s an interesting dynamic at play here. The women observed that it was common to have “criminals” hanging around toilets, who used the women’s vulnerability against them. This added to the women’s fear of harassment and theft. On the other hand, should the women be in danger, it was easier for her to create attention and draw on support if the toilet was in plain sight of other people. A further aspect of safety was that of risks to the women’s health. The fact that women must sit (although it is argued that squatting is actually healthier) to use the toilet puts their health at significant risk. The more people sharing a toilet the higher the risk of infections.
Image of a discussion with ladies from Europe
Now what?
In order to improve the toilets, the trick is to make sure women feel this sense of protection without exposing them to the possible risks that may come with too much exposure. A possible improvement is the positioning and arrangement of the toilets. By approaching toilets more like public spaces, instead of single units, and thus applying the same rules. That is, carefully designing spaces conscious of the users.
Interesting article; it seems that something we take so much for granted is still very much a privileged for some. Thanks for sharing.
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