User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Pakistan

Public toilets in Pakistan are most commonly found at mosques, which have limited hours of availability and are often pit latrines.

Public toilet access in the country mirrors a broader issue regarding general lack of toilet access and the lack of sanitation systems in Pakistan.

Public toilets
The most common type of public toilet in the 2000s was a toilet at a mosque. One of the issues with these toilets was they had limited hours, often only open around prayer time. Where public toilets ere available in the 2000s, most were latrines and they did not have access to any sort of sewage system; there was no liquid or solid waste disposal for these public toilets.

The lack of public toilets is an issue for women, who need to plan their daily lives around figuring out when and where they can relieve themselves. Long clothes can sometimes give women privacy though in an emergency as they can hide private functions like open defecation. Men have it a bit easier as they can use a salwar kameez to cover themselves if engaging in public defecation because of a lack of public toilets.

History
The National Sanitary Policy of 2006 intended to set up standards for sanitary policies for smaller communities in the country. Some of policies involved goals related to building and maintaining public toilets.

Open defecation and sanitation
In the 2000s, it was a common site in Pakistan to see men urinating or defecating in public. Indifference by civic agencies in Karachi to open defecation and urination became more routine in the 2000s.

WaterAid ranked Pakistan as one of the ten worst in the world in 2016 for urban access to safe and private toilets. One of the reasons Pakistan ranked 127 out of 162 countries on the 2005 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)  development index was because of lack of sanitation and water supply. Around 45% of Pakistani households lacked a toilet or latrine in 2005. Only 51% of Pakistani households had any sort of waste drainage connection in 2005. 35% of households had open drains and 16% had access to underground sewers or covered drains. In 2005, 81% of Pakistani households did not have a garbage collection service. Less than 1% of GDP was spent on sanitation in 2005.

Regional and global situation impacting public toilets in Pakistan
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. An issue in developing countries is toilet access in schools. Only 46% of schools in developing countries have them. 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. 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. Toilet paper and flush toilets were introduced relatively recently in many parts of Asia. They often are not found in public toilets, and may only be found in hotels catering to international guests and wealth clients.

Toilets can often be found on more modern long distance buses in Asia. For shorter trips or on older buses, they are much less common. Where toilets are not available on long distance buses, buses often make stops for toilet breaks. Sometimes the stops are in open fields. Many youth hostels and hotels catering to backpackers in Asia do not provide toilet paper.