World Toilet Day: How pit latrines are still thriving in resident homes at Sowutuom-VRA

A mixture of smells, not sweet-scented, but from pits with human excreta; that’s what meets you when you move around some parts of VRA, a community in the heart of Accra, near Suotuom.

The area which is relatively expanding with time, still has many homes with pit-latrines. It is quite impressive to say open defecation is almost absent in the area, most homes have a toilet facility.
The decency of these facilities however, is the issue. It is enough to keep people from defecating around, but not enough to stop the dire health implications that come with it.

Aside the stench, flies from these laterines hover over food, and household equipment of residents considering these pits are not very far from their homes.

Today being World Toilet Day, Ghanaweb visited the community, to put the spotlight on the situation and speak to some residents.

“It is a pit, we have to squat over to defecate. It was a wooden structure at first but it got destroyed so we built a new one. It came with the house, the landlord built it for us,” Madam Augustina Osarfo said.

“We were tasked with building our own toilets. We only built it when we moved into the house. It was only a wooden structure like the ones in the village but as the area developed, we built a pit with a water closet,” another resident said.



World Toilet day is set aside each year on 19th November to inspire the world to tackle the global sanitation crisis and help achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6), which promises sanitation for all by 2030. World Toilet Day 2019 is drawing attention to those people being left behind without sanitation.