User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Ghana

Public toilets in Ghana are few, with around one toilet per 100,000 people. Public toilets were originally free in the 1980s. As a result of changes in government, they started to become pay toilets in the late 1980s and went fully private based winning bids from the local government by the mid-1990s. Political corruption has made building them very difficult, and made prioritizing increasing residential access to a private toilet even harder. The public toilets that do exist are largely privately run with a goal of making money, often making them very dirty and expensive.

Public toilets
A 2021 study found there was one public toilet per 100,000 people. Public toilets can be expensive to use. In Kumasi, a family could spend 10 - 15% of their monthly income if every family member used public toilets just once a day. Urban dwellers in Sagnarigu Municipal District are overly reliant on the use of public toilets as a many residences lack their own water supplies. Over half the population of Ghana, 59% total, relied on public toilets as their primary toilet.

19% of the population in the 2010s practiced open defecation. On a per capita basis, WaterAid said in 2016 that the country was in the top ten for having the least number of safe and private toilets in urban areas. Many people in the country bathe or shower multiple times a day.

History
In 1982, public toilets were often free to use, with the management and cleaning costs absorbed by local city councils. For a a variety of reasons, employees were not very motivated and the public toilets were not kept very clean or maintained. Changes in management happened, which saw the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) put in charge of public toilets. In this period, public toilets began to charge small access fees and their quality began to improve some. The fees collected from public toilet use began to be misused by the CDRs and municipal governments soon found themselves again in charge of local city toilets, who at that point had been renamed Metropolitan Assemblies. The process for privatization began in 1989. There were 784 public toilets in Accra and Kumasi by the mid-1980s.

From 1990 to 2000, the number of urban dwellers in Ghana without access to toilet facilities increased.

The average daily water usage per person between 1998-2002 was less than 50 liters a day. This limited the ability to use flush toilet systems in public toilets.

In the 2000s, it was hard to improve public toilets in the country because of political corruption. Building household toilets was at times deprioritized so money making public toilets could be built instead. In the 1990s, most of the public toilet contracts in Kumasi were given to member Assembly members, who used these contracts as part of a patronage system and to supplement their government allowances. Despite the crucial nature of the service they provided, the quality of public privatized pay toilets was low.

An attempt in 2000 to make the public toilet contract process more transparent and competitive resulted in a new set of conflicts between Assembly Members and Sub-Metropolitan District Councils. Community groups were often dependent on local politicians and could not act completely independently, especially in the less well off parts of Kumasi and Accra. The reforms did little to fix the public toilet quality issues in these cities. Efforts to use private contractors or community groups to manage public toilets in Accra and Kumasi during the 2000s were largely a failure. In the mid-2000s, 25% and 38% of the population still relied on public pit latrines for all their toilet needs. The problem with private public toilet operators continued, and they continued to be rarely responsive to community needs, and only responded to political interests. Consequently, many public toilets in Accra continued to be filthy. As these were often situated in deprived areas, local residents often had no viable alternative.

Many urban dwellers in Ghana, regardless of class, lacked access to any sort of toilet facility in the 2000s and 2010s. This included access to public toilets, pit latrines and in residence toilet facilities. Accra and Kumasi saw the greatest decline public toilet facilities in their suburbs and areas on their periphery. Efforts to use private contractors or community groups to manage public toilets in Accra and Kumasi during the 2000s were largely a failure.

Regional and global situation impacting public toilets in Ghana
Around 2.5 billion people around the world in 2018 did not have access to adequate toilet facilities. Around 4.5 billion people lacked access to proper sanitation. 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.

In developing countries, unisex public toilets have been a disaster because they make women feel unsafe and fail to consider local religious beliefs. Across Africa, open defecation had social consequences. These included loss of dignity and privacy. It also put women at risk of sexual violence. Many schools around the world in 2018 did not have toilets, with the problem particularly acute in parts of Africa and Asia. Only one in five primary schools on earth had a toilet and only one in eight secondary schools had public toilets. German notions of cultural codes around the usage of public toilets has been exported to many parts of the world as a result of German colonialism, but many places in Africa and the Pacific continue to challenge those norms around cleanliness well into the 2010s. There are generally two toilet styles in public bathrooms in Africa. One is a traditional squat toilet. The other is a western style toilet with bowl and a place to sit.