User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Afghanistan

Public toilets in Afghanistan can often be found in mosques and are not very clean. Some of the first public toilets appeared in the late 1800s. Women have faced issues with public toilets in Afghanistan.

Public toilets
Public toilets can sometimes be found in mosques. A lack of available cleaning supplies and being one of the few public toilets around means these toilets can often be dirty. Public toilets can also be found at airports. Most are squat toilets. The most common toilet type among all toilets is a raised drop latrine. This setup is even used in multistory buildings.

History
In the late 1800s, Abdur Rahman Khan ordered the construction of public toilets in Kabul. The first public pay toilets arrived in Afghanistan in the 1970s.

For women traveling via long distance bus in the 1980s, it was often difficult to use the toilet during rest breaks as women required finding a bush or some other form of privacy before engaging in open defecation compared to men who could engage in that more openly. In the 2000s, there were few public toilets for women. In some airports, public toilets were unisex but tended to be filled with men; women often just held it rather than use them.

In the 2000s, India was involved with development schemes inside Afghanistan, with some of these schemes involving the construction of public toilets. For their own safety in the 2010s, female police officers often went to public toilets in pairs. There were 35 public toilets in Kabul in 2011.

Regional and global situation impacting public toilets in Afghanistan


Public toilet access around the world is most acute in the Global South, with around 3.6 billion people, 40% of the world's total population, lacking access to any toilet facilities. 2.3 people in the the Global South do not have toilet facilities in their residence. Despite the fact that the United Nation made a declaration in 2010 that clean water and sanitation is a human right, little has been done in many places towards addressing this on a wider level.

Public toilets, depending on their design, can be tools of social exclusion. The lack of single-sex women's toilets in developing countries makes it harder for women to participate in public life, in education and in the workplace.