User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Public toilets in the Democratic Republic of Congo has poorly maintained public toilets, a situation that is coupled with some of the lowest sanitation coverage in the whole of Africa.

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. WaterAid ranked the country as one of the ten worst in the world in 2016 for urban access to safe and private toilets. On a per capita basis, WaterAid said in 2016 that the country was in the top ten for having the least number of safe and private toilets in urban areas. In 2000, the countries with the lowest sanitation coverage in Africa were Ethiopia, Benin, Congo, Gabon and Niger. In 2020, only 29% of the residents of Kinshasa had access to adequate toilet facilities. There were 900 deaths from cholera in the Central African Republic in 2018; the disease spreads largely as a result of poor sanitation.

The Swiss association Stay Clean was working to equip local markets with dry toilet blocks in Kinshasa. The material from the toilets could be used for biogas or organic fertilizer. Stay Clean launched the program to try to decrease open defecation and improve the health of women and children in the city.

Matadi was given 68,000 Zaires from the central government in the mid-1960s for the construction of new public toilets and maintenance of existing ones. Some of this work was carried out by prisoners.

Regional and global situation impacting public toilets in the Democratic Republic of Congo
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. 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.

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.

Flush toilets are often only found in affluent areas of developing countries.