More than half of people living in informal settlements in East Africa live in insanitary and overcrowded conditions. The number of people without adequate access to sanitation is around 55% in Kenya, 63% in Uganda and 68% in Rwanda.
It’s estimated that about 2.5 billion people still lack access to adequate sanitation facilities, and instead of having a safe and clean environment for taking care of their bodily wastes, are forced to rely on the most primitive of toilets, such as a hole in the ground, or poorly designed and maintained latrines.
In places like Kibera, a slum of (depending on who you ask) between a quarter million and one million people in Nairobi, Kenya, the absence of toilets can really smack you in the face—literally. Kibera is famous for its residents’ rampant usage of “flying toilets,” bags filled with feces and chucked out the window, for lack of access to reliable facilities.
Water and sanitation services in this slum are almost non-existent. Open sewers and unrestrained waste disposal is evident everywhere.
These conditions are complicit in the deaths of some 4,000 children each and every day from preventable water- and sanitation-related diseases, and that’s not accounting for the mental and emotional stress that comes from having to resort to open defecation, nor the huge impact that lack of toilets has on education, especially for girls and women.
One organization that is working to make a difference when it comes to sanitation is a startup out of Georgia, called Wish for WASH, led by founder Jasmine Burton and her team of ‘visioneers,’ who have developed a unique toilet appliance that could be a cornerstone of community-led solutions to water- and hygiene-related disease in the developing world.
Burton and her partners took top honors for their “SafiChoo” toilet at Georgia Tech’s 2014 InVenture competition, and have been able to run a pilot program with their innovation at Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp.
The SafiChoo is an inexpensive, mobile toilet that lowers fecal-oral contamination and reduces stress on the body while maintaining the cultural practices of squatting and anal cleansing, in order to bring relief to refugees in the developing world.
This can also be used in slum areas where the idea of flying toilets is so rampant.
One of the major differences in the SafiChoo, as compared with many other sanitation devices, is that it uses a modular design, which allows communities to choose the configuration that best meets their own cultural needs, whether it’s squatting vs sitting or washing vs wiping.
God bless you for your compassion for others. .this toilet will be a blessing to those in need.