User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Rwanda

Public toilets in Rwanda were a concern for the national government. Local geological conditions could dictate the best type of public toilet. The city of Kigali started investing in the building of public toilets in the 2020s, but they also believed the private sector should be involved in those efforts.

Public Toilets
A French speaking country, the local words for toilets include toilettes and WC, while the local word for toilet paper is Papier toilette, the word for men's toilet is hommes and the word for women's toilet is femmes.

The quality of public toilets is very low, with most being dirty or poorly maintained.

Rwanda's Vision 2020 included a national policy to try to give 100% sanitation coverage in the country. The plan also included directives on appropriate sanitation technologies.

In the volcanic region of Rwanda, eco-toilets have been explored as a viable alternative to pit latrines as a result of the difficulty in actually digging pits for this type of toilet. One of the advantages of this type of toilet was eco-toilet owners could sell human excrement for use in agriculture.

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.

Kigali
A 2019 study by the City of Kigali found the city needed an additional 176 public toilets to meet the growing demands of the city. At the end of 2021, there were 101 public toilets in Kigali and an additional eleven public toilets were then under construction.

In 2022, open defecation was practiced in Kigali. Kigali's local government in 2022 believed the lack of public toilets was an issue for commercial businesses to deal with. Construction of seven public local government run toilets in Kigali began in April 2022. Each facility had eight stalls. The city had identified a further forty-two sites where they planned to build more public toilets. In August 2022, the City of Kigali was in talks with local petrol stations, trying to convince them to build toilets that could be accessed by the public.

Regional and global situation impacting public toilets in Rwanda
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.

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.

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. Across Africa, open defecation had social consequences. These included loss of dignity and privacy. It also put women at risk of sexual violence.

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. 344 million children in sub-Saharan Africa did not have a toilet in their home in 2018. The lack of toilet access put these children at risk of water borne diseases.

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. Only a few places tend to have flush toilets with toilet seats. These include high end hotels and restaurants. Mid-range hotels and restaurants may have a toilet but no seat or may have a squat toilet.