User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Haiti

Public toilets in Haiti face challenges. These include being closed at night in the country's slums, opposition from residents about installing them, and a general lack of sanitation coverage in the country.

Public toilets
Public toilets in the country's slums have frequently been overcrowded and closed at night.

80% of the population in 2011 lacked access to basic sanitation. In rural areas of Haiti in 2016, 25% of the population practiced open defecation because of a lack of access to toilets. Only 28% of the population in those areas had a toilet at their residence. Only 35% of the population lacked access to  basic drinking water in January 2020. Two third lacked access to or had limited sanitation services.

Locals near Place Saint-Pierre opposed the plan to build a public toilet block in 2018. Town Hall of Pétion-Ville, the National Directorate of Drinking Water and Sanitation and locals managed to come to a new agreement on how to build a new sanitation block, though they had to negotiate where it would be built.

Cité Soleil had jobs for people cleaning public toilets designed by Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods in the early 2010s.

Entrepreneurs were building toilets that could be set up inside a home or in a public space, where they charged for the toilet and the collection of its contents during the 2010s.

The US Centers for Disease Control, the Haiti Ministry of Public Health and Population, and Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods  worked together during the covid-19 pandemic by providing people in the northern part of the country toilets that could easily be used indoors. The groups had originally considered bringing in large locked of mobile toilets that could provide access to 150 households. Because of how covid spread, the use of public toilets was not implemented and instead the groups decided to give families waterless toilets that could be used inside their homes. Poop and pee from public toilets has been used as compost, providing nutrient rich fertilizer through a project by  Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods.

Regional and global situation impacting public toilets in Haiti
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.

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.