Encourage families in Ghana to install home latrines

In Ghana, three-quarters of the population lack decent sanitation. Poor sanitation is the cause of many life-threatening diseases, including diarrhoea, and the lives of many children could be saved if latrines were installed in their homes. What factors affect whether families in Ghana have installed their own toilet?

Ghana, in contrast with otherAfrican countries, has built a large number of public toilets. As a consequencethe number of privately owned toilets is quite low,and only 25 percent of families have a toilet within the home or compound. InGhana, emptying your bowels first thing in the morning is important to startyour day well, and there are long queues at the public latrines, morning andevening, despite their often unhygienic and unpleasant condition.

A study by the University of California Davis and the London School ofHygiene and Tropical Medicine considered why most families in Ghana do not havetoilets.  A behavioral model of thedecision to install a home toilet was developed and interviews were conductedwith a nationally representative sample of 536 mothers of young children livingin rural or semi-urban areas.

The study found thatthree-quarters of the people surveyed did not have toilets either at home or intheir compound. Of these, 65 percent were dissatisfied with current sanitaryarrangements, and complained of the smell and dirt, distance to the toilets,having to pay and sharing them with others. Families with toilets said theirdecision to install one was triggered by needs for convenience, for sick orelderly relatives and for safety at night. Almost 62 percent of households hadnever thought of installing a toilet. Of the households who had considered theissue, 80 percent thought it possible, but only 6 percent thought it verylikely that they would build facilities within the next 12 months.

Families gave the followingreasons why they did not have a toilet:

• lackof space – in semi-urban areas families are densely packed into small areas andoften live in compounds
• highcosts of installation and lack of credit - limited savings are often spent onschool fees
• lackof people able to build the toilets, and the complexity of the building work
• lackof home ownership - tenants have no control over sanitation installation in thehome

In order to encourage morefamilies to install toilets the study recommends that:

• Advertisingcampaigns highlight the benefits of owning your own toilet (convenience, safetyand cleanliness) and point out the disadvantages of the public toilets (thestench and dirt) as perceived by Ghanaians themselves.
• Legalaction is taken to encourage landlords to install toilets in their properties.
• Newtechnologies are developed and marketed to tackle the problem of limited space.A bucket-emptying service worked well for several decades until it was phasedout by national policy.
• Publicpolicy addresses the lack of credit for home improvements. In Vietnamflexible payment schemes are helping low-income families.