User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Papua New Guinea

Public toilets in Papua New Guinea are few as sanitation infrastructure is not universal. More public toilet facilities are needed, a problem that has been identified as existing since the 1970s.

Public toilets
Many parts of the population do not have access to toilets or running water. 42% of schools in Papua New Guinea in 2005 said they needed more toilets for boys and 49% said they needed more toilets for girls. There are public toilets where the walls are built from bamboo.

There was no tradition of public toilets in the 1970s and 1980s, the the Department of Health said that most of the population would not know how to use or maintain them even if they did exist. The few public toilets that did exist in this period were in schools, markets and hospitals. They were often poorly designed, could not serve the volume of population that needed to use them, and frequently were not clean or maintained. The Papua New Guinea national health plan, 1986-1990 called for building more public toilets, to be built using designs that facilitated easy cleaning and hiring attendants charged with cleaning the toilets on a daily basis.

While there was a lot of development around Porgera Station in the 1980s and a clear need for the construction of public toilets, that was not done. This situation continued on into the 1990s, despite the fact that typhoid, spread because of poor sanitation, was endemic in the area.

The covid-19 pandemic resulted in the closure of many public toilets. This had a flow on effect of making it harder for women to dispose of menstrual products, which made their lives even more difficult during confinement.

Regional and global situation impacting public toilets in Papua New Guinea
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.