Water Wheel Nov/Dec 2024: World Toilet Day

Abstract

On August 14, 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa launched the Sanitation Appropriate for Education (SAFE) Initiative in response to a spate of school learner fatalities in unsafe and dilapidated school toilet facilities. The SAFE Initiative’s mandate is to “spare generations of young South Africans the indignity, discomfort and danger of using pit latrines and other unsafe facilities in schools” . It is timeous and needs to be sustained with multi-stakeholder support and attention until every school learner in South Africa has access to a school toilet facility that allows them to perform basic bodily functions in privacy and dignity without fear or danger to their health, safety, and overall well-being, regardless of whether it is a school situated in an urban, peri-urban or rural setting. However, focus and emphasis of the SAFE initiative is mainly on capital expenditure, on replacing old unimproved pit latrines, and very little budget is given to much-needed operations and maintenance.

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