Founder of the World Toilet Organisation Jack Sim says that on the African continent there has been some progress in terms of the community-led total sanitation approach. Courtesy: Meropa Communications

By Fatima Asmal-Motala
DURBAN, South Africa, Dec 10 2012 (IPS)

When the founder of the World Toilet Organisation Jack Sim turned 40, he literally began counting how many more days he had to live and felt a sense of urgency to do meaningful things with the remainder of his life.

“Can you imagine a person coming into this world and spending his life only helping himself? When this person dies, his life has had no meaning, so why did he bother coming here?” he asks.

A successful businessman, Sim turned his attention to an area which he felt was severely neglected.

“The toilet was completely neglected in Singapore (his home country). I realised it was the same all over the world. People felt very embarrassed. Now I’ve broken the taboo and legitimised the subject through 12 years of effective advocacy. I am proud to say I have broken the taboo surrounding the subject of sanitation.”

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q:  Why is good sanitation so important?

A: To grow a country, you need healthy people. You rather prevent people being sick than cure them once they’re sick. Toilets are the cheapest preventative medicine in the world.

Proper sanitation, together with hand washing with soap, will reduce illness by between 50 to 80 percent. A lot of illness – diarrhoea, worms and other diseases – are basically due to the spread of pathogens from the faeces, transmission paths through the fingers, the feet, the flies and the fluid. If you can break this, people can be healthy.

We need covered toilets which flies cannot reach, people cannot step on, rain cannot wash away and spread, as well as a place to wash the hands. To achieve this we need education – why is a toilet good for you – make it a trend rather than a prescription. If it’s fashion, people will follow.

Toilets also need owners. Without an owner it will become dysfunctional very quickly. If someone buys a toilet, he feels he owns it. If he doesn’t own it, a sense of ownership has to be cultivated. People have to be trained as cleaners and as security personnel.

If you have no toilets, you get unhappy, unhealthy people – as a result of which you have low productivity, so low income. You then have to incur expenditure due to illnesses and this can break subsistence survival, creating a poverty cycle, which becomes a political problem. Good sanitation can prevent all these time bombs which will explode.

Q:  What progress has been made on the African continent in terms of sanitation?

A:  The good news is that Africa is currently experiencing one of its most peaceful periods in recent history. Because of that its economic growth is on average faster than even the Asian growth rate. When people have a little bit more money, they have higher expectations. So the demand for toilets is easier to create.

On the African continent there has been some progress in terms of the community-led total sanitation approach which triggers people to dig their own holes, thereby encouraging them to have their own rudimentary toilets.

Through this approach, people realise the need for a proper toilet quickly. They start by digging a hole and going to a fixed place to defecate. This is already a big change of behaviour – they suddenly feel disciplined; they feel the need to be private, to protect their neighbours.

So the first phase is just to go to a fixed place, and to cover the hole. It’s very rudimentary, but it’s better than being outside, where women can get molested.

In the second phase, people are encouraged to buy toilets, which cost between 50 to 100 dollars. Once they own them, jealousy and comparisons set in – and nobody likes to be looked down upon.

Q:  How high is that “demand” currently in Africa?

A:  What we need to do is to move the toilet to a higher level on the list of personal priorities – as high as the cell phone. For most people on the continent, the priority has been a television set, then a cell phone, but not a toilet. What we need to do is to make it fashionable to own a toilet – to convey the message that if you don’t have a toilet you’re living in an animal state. People don’t want to be classed as living in an animal state.

Q:  What about the supply side – how easy is it for an individual to access a toilet?

A: We have to make toilets available either by the government, or affordable for people to buy, with on-site treatment, safe sanitation, maintenance cleaners who are also professionally trained as technicians. And we also have to provide education for the community to care for their toilets so they can continue to enjoy using them. In other words on the supply side, the effort requires a combination of people, the government and the private sector.

Q: What about South Africa? Has any progress been made here?

A: A little bit. But the growth of informal settlements is creating a lot of difficulties, not just in terms of provision of toilets, but also where to put them. You can’t put a permanent structure on illegal land. Yet people need toilets. There needs to be some legal policy reform that allows a permanent toilet.

Why should it be mobile? Sometimes a mobile toilet is too far away to comfortably access. Also people are practising open defecation – so there’s a habit change barrier. They may ask, why should they use toilets which are not well-maintained, which are dirty and smelly and full and which can’t even be used?

The government is also not fast enough in terms of provision, but I think they are interested in speeding up the programme because they know that you can’t have a nation of sick people.

Q:  How is the World Toilet Organisation involved in improving sanitation in Africa? 

A: We have partnered with Unilever to launch an academy. We are going to go to schools and encourage children to start using toilets earlier; when they use toilets at school, they’ll promote usage at homes.

Supply of toilets on the African continent has not caught up with demand. This academy will train people to manufacture toilets in very small factories, thereby making them businessmen making affordable products at a profit, selling to their own communities.

What happens is that sanitation now goes beyond health and hygiene, when a woman has an income she has more power at home, she can use her money wisely for the family, she has a bigger say when talking to her mother-in-law and husband.

So we’re creating gender equality and sustainability. We did very well in Cambodia. In three years 24,000 toilets were manufactured, generating 48,000 dollars for sales agents. We look forward to the day every person everywhere has access to a clean safe toilet at any time they need to go.

The signing of a wage agreement between transport workers’ unions and employers on Friday, Oct. 12 may have brought a three-week long truck driver’s strike to an end but analysts say the effects are far reaching and will continue to impact on the South African economy.

“My estimates are that the strike has cost the economy 15 billion rands (about 1.7 billion dollars),” said labour economist Loane Sharp. “That cannot be made up when a strike ends because it relates to cancelled supply contracts.”

Sharp told IPS that the retail and wholesale trade sectors of the South African economy were likely to have felt the effects more severely, together with the logistics and manufacturing sector.

Wage negotiations between transport workers’ unions and employers’ body, the Road and Freight Association, began in June at the National Bargaining Council for the Road Freight and Logistics Industry and continued until early September when the former declared an official deadlock, and announced an indefinite strike which resulted in empty shelves at supermarkets across South Africa.

Service stations in small towns also ran out of fuel due to delays in deliveries and some ATMS around the country were also reported to have run out of cash.

The strike was marked by violence which left several truck drivers injured and one dead, and a number of trucks damaged or destroyed.

But on Oct. 12, the Road Freight Employers’ Association announced that it had struck a three-year wage deal with truck driver unions. The deal was staggered over three years and entails a 10 percent wage increase in the first year, eight in the second, and nine in the third.

Independent labour analyst Gavin Brown told IPS that the average consumer would also have a price to pay.

“The transport strike has obviously damaged the economy in that it has retarded economic growth for the year across a range of sectors, which means less wealth creation, and less tax revenue,” he explained.

“But, more importantly, together with the violence post Marikana – it has encouraged a mini-flight of capital from the country which we will all have to pay for through inflation and more expensive imports, especially petrol, in the months ahead,” Brown said. The Marikana platinum strike, in South Africa’s North West Province, made international headlines after 34 miners were shot dead by police after protests turned violent on Aug. 16. The death toll later climbed to 46.

Sharp added that the strikes could also have an adverse effect on the country’s employment rate. “What these strikes mean is that there’ll be less employment – for every one percent extra wage demand, employment falls by 0.7 percent.”

Even strikers themselves would be affected, he pointed out.

“Strikes are irrational because it takes workers three to five years to make up the earnings they have lost.”

Road Freight Employer’s Association chairperson Penwell Lunga told reporters on Oct. 12 that workers had lost millions of dollars in wages as a result of the strike.  “Workers lost R271-million in wages while employers suffered a R1.2-billion loss a week,” he said.

Sharp said that strikes were nothing new within the South African context.

“This occurs every year – every year we have a strike and every year workers are demanding higher wages than their labour productivity can justify.”

Sharp said wages should be connected to productivity. “In South Africa wages are connected to numbers that unions suck out of the air, which makes our labour uncompetitive internationally.”

He said that workers should make agreements with employers, which linked their wages to productivity.  “Then employers will be happy to pay them potentially more than they demand.”

Michael Singh*, a senior staff member Time Freight, the country’s leading national courier company, welcomed the news. “The strike affected us really badly. We had no drivers or assistants – I’m not a driver, but I was actually on the road myself for a week,” he told IPS.

He said that the economic losses to the company had been severe.  “I don’t know the exact figures but we lost a lot of business. Three of our offices had no staff; the others were barely staffed.”

He added that whilst he understood why truck drivers wanted an increase, he did not agree with the way they went about demanding it. “We’ve been shot at – a bullet just missed one of our drivers, our trucks were stoned, we had broken windscreens and broken mirrors.”

According to Brown such violence was unnecessary.

“Our collective bargaining system is already very sophisticated given the structure of our economy and the composition of the labour force. The system is capable of addressing all the issues behind the current strikes but was never intended to deal with armed insurrection and criminal violence on the scale we have seen recently,” he said.

*Name changed.