User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Bangladesh

Public toilets in Bangladesh are rare, and those that do exist are often dirty. Non-profits have been involved in trying to improve public toilet access.

Public toilet
Public toilets are often dirty. WaterAid had an app for people in Dhaka and located along major highways to locate public toilets. There were 47 public toilets in Dhaka, a city of 7 million people, in 2011. The lack of public toilets means many people in the country try to hold back the need to urinate. This leads many to having urinary infections.

Some women feel uncomfortable using public toilets because men are in charge of some of them, and that can mean needing to have conversations with them about intimate issues. Local residents in Chittagong and Dhaka often found themselves frustration by nongovernmental organizations and community organizations projects around public toilet and sanitation projects in the 2000s. This was in large part because after the initial funding for the project ran its course, there was little to no ongoing support to continue projects and maintain infrastructure created in support of them.

H&M Foundation’s Project SUNRISE and WaterAid helped to build 30 public toilets in bus stations around Dhaka in the mid-2010s.

According to Graham Askey, author of Toilets of the Wild Frontier, a public toilet in Bangladesh that consisted of sink was one of the worst in the world.

WaterAid ranked the country as one of the ten worst in the world in 2016 for urban access to safe and private toilets. The Asian Development Bank started working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2013 on improving fecal sludge management, including investing in non-sewered sanitation projects, in a number of countries including this one.

Regional and global situation impacting public toilets in Bangladesh
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. Lack of access to adequate sanitation in the 2000s and 2010s left women particularly vulnerable to gender violence.

In many places in rural Asia, having toilets in a house is considered unclean. As a result, toilets are often located outside the main building for a residence or people practice open defecation because of a lack of toilet access in their homes.