Filthy school latrines 'routine'

06 August 2015 - 02:21 By Nivashni Nair

Amanda Busane's brain went into overdrive as she imagined "soft fluffy toilet rolls, clean smelling toilets and my dignity" when she learned that her school toilets were going to be renovated. "Oh my word! We were as thrilled as children getting ice cream for breakfast," the Waterloo Primary School pupil said in Durban yesterday.Before the renovation there were no doors, broken toilets, and boys and girls shared one toilet.Although Waterloo Primary School was a statistic along with 2.3billion others in the world without proper sanitation, it was better off than two-thirds of the country's schools.NGO Equal Education reported in May this year that the ratio of pupils to toilets in some Gauteng schools was 100:1.In the audit of 200 of the 2000 township schools in Gauteng they found one out of every five toilets was broken and nearly 70% of pupils did not have access to soap.To help improve the situation, Unicef and Unilever's Domestos brand yesterday vowed to continue fighting poor sanitation at schools, and their message was clear - communities had to join the fight.Unilever's Justin Apsey explained that in only one of the 24 schools the company had renovated had mothers of pupils taken over the task of cleaning toilets.The company has employed community members as janitors to clean the toilets at the schools it has renovated.KwaZulu-Natal education department infrastructure and planning manager Hugh Bulcock said the challenge of providing proper sanitation in schools was not only about infrastructure."Infrastructure was provided. Yes, the challenge of janitors in the schools is massive. It's more about behavioural changes," he said.Last week Bulcock visited a primary school where "you could eat off the toilet floor"."Then we went down the road to a secondary school. Well, you didn't want to be within 100m of that school."It's about behaviour change in management. From an education department point of view we need to reinforce that so we don't have to build toilets for a third and fourth time at a school," he said.Unilever chairman Peter Cowan said: "We can talk about it forever."With Unicef we are getting on with it."..

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