User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Palau

Public toilets in Palau are few. Efforts have been underway to improve them, but there have been some setbacks.

Public toilets
Palau needs more public toilets. Toilets were located in some businesses like supermarkets, but these were not always intended for the public.

In 2007, the national government launched a program talking up the benefits of sanitation, including invisible benefits like poor health, reduced educational opportunities and loss of dignity. As part of efforts to improve the tourism sector, the government built seven composting toilets. The Asian Development Bank provided funding to help improve public toilets in Koror in the 2020s, committing USD$30 million to a broader sanitation project which the public toilets were part of. The Environmental Quality Protection Board put a moratorium on new connections for the Koror-Airai Public Sewer System in February 2016. The moratorium did not impact the installation of plumbing for toilets and bathrooms at hotels under construction.

Regional and global situation impacting public toilets in Palau
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.

Foreigners visiting the South Pacific in the 1990s were advised to bring their own white toilet paper, and tampons or sanitary napkins as they were not commonly found in the region. Septic systems and any sewage systems were not strong enough in the 1990s for tampons to be thrown into them.

Around one in three women in the world in 2016 lacked access to a toilet. In developing countries, unisex public toilets have been a disaster because they make women feel unsafe and fail to consider local religious beliefs.

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. Local resistance to toilet cleanliness justified further German repression on the part of the local population during their colonial period.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many people in the Pacific region had the misconception that HIV and AIDS could be transmitted by using public toilets.