Sanitation Festival in Freetown

By: Ibrahim Bakarr Bangura, Sulaiman Foday Kamara, Braima Koroma, Robin Bloch, Freetown Team Researchers, June 2021

The Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC) organized a sanitation tour on the theme: ‘Just Sanitation Across African Cities in Freetown’ to celebrate World Toilet Day on November, 19^th 2020. In the context of the OVERDUE project, the ‘Sanitation Festival’ was a way to celebrate sanitation actors and their vital role, while achieving our objectives of supporting actors and institutions who keep communities healthy and documenting the practices around sanitation. It is about taking action to tackle sanitation crisis and achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6: Water and Sanitation for all by 2030.

SLURC brought together the Freetown City Council (FCC) and a wide range of stakeholders, including private sanitation service providers (Immaculate, Kari Septic Emptier, Gento Liquid Waste, Charliesc), BRAC – Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone Environment Protection Agency, Action against Hunger, Youth Development Movement, GOAL – Sierra Leone, Concern Worldwide, the Disaster Management Department (Office of National Security), Manual Pit Emptier, Waste Management Companies, the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (FEDURP), the Centre for Dialogue on Human Settlements and Poverty Alleviation (CODOHSAPA), YMCA – Sierra Leone, community groups/representatives celebrating all the women and men, boys and girls who maintain safe sanitation facilities. 

To initiate the process, two joint planning workshop, one-to-one informal discussion and formal discussion with NGOs and service providers were organized. The aim was to:
(i) decide on the route of the sanitation festival tour in order to draw public attention to our messages;
(ii) establish working group for planning,
(iii) decide on places to visit in order to capture the perspectives and experiences of different groups, of both formal and informal settlements;
(iv) share roles and responsibilities to all key sanitation stakeholders to ensure commitment to collective action and ownership of the event.  

Together, we crafted key messages, and engaged in discussion across the city in a way that can help people to better understand and take personal responsibility for good sanitation practices in their immediate environments and communities. Some of the messages include the following:

• Having a household toilet improves the quality of life and well-being;
• No access to a toilet is not just unpleasant, it is dangerous for the safety of women and children;
• Our toilets bring dignity, equality and safety;
• Thanks to our heroes like the manual pit emptier and the mechanical pit emptier;
• Duya, make sure say u kaka nor ambog u neba (meaning ‘you should not let your toilet disturb your neighbours’).

On the sanitation tour, we visited three informal settlements – Crab Town, Kolleh Town and Gray Bush (CKG), Colbot and Portee-Rokupa. These settlements are located along the coastal areas affected by overcrowding and insanitary conditions, which pose a high risk of disease, with great prospects of serving as hubs of its transmission.

We also visited/stopped and interrogated market women’s and school going children. In addition, the sanitation tour created spaces and opportunity for sanitation providers, public agencies, and residents to meet and discuss what sanitation (in)justice means in each context.

For example, the inclusion of the FCC in the preparatory process of sanitation tour gave them the opportunity to publicize the ‘Sanitation Hotline 8244’, to which residents can reach out to signal waste and faecal sludge issues. It is hoped that the publicity made will make the sanitation department of the FCC to be more efficient in their response to urgent sanitation-related issues reported by the public across the city.

The major findings emerging from the sanitation festival tour include:

• Unsanitary conditions are a real problem and a threat to public health particularly in informal settlements and market areas. It is observed to be an infection hotspot for women and girls due to lack of access to safe sanitation facilities.
• At the city scale, investment in sanitation infrastructure and services is a major challenge.
• Sanitation practices including cleaning and provision of water is the utmost responsibility of the women and girls. Yet they are rarely paid for their work, acknowledged, or included as sanitation stakeholders and providers.
• Sanitation taboos related to menstruation and personal hygiene are a challenge.
• There is a lack of community initiatives to self-organize in improving sanitary conditions both at the household and community levels in precarious informal settlements
• .Households without toilets are more likely to use shared toilets, but they do not have ownership in terms of decision on its use, operation or improvements.
• Limited land space and tenure security, particularly in informal settlements, is limiting  toilet facilities in households/communities.
• Having a toilet is viewed as a luxury irrespective of the place of residence. Toilets in informal settlements are a source of power.
• Apart from the municipal communal toilets, all others are shared by both men and women.
• The shame linked to open defecation induces the use of alternative options such as the use of buckets in homes for defecation.
• Despite their critical role as sanitation users, producers and decision-makers, women have limited spaces to raise their voices.
• Local authorities are focused more on sanitary issues in formal neighbourhoods of the city than informal settlements, markets and workplace dominantly occupied by women.
• Sanitation must be considered across the off-grid/on-grid divide and gender relations. Any potential future investments to improve sanitation across places must be done with a gender lens.

This is the first time we are seeing a celebration of this nature.We are so happy that you have come and see the realities of the sanitation challenges we are faced with in this community.

Tribal Chief, Colbot

The communities were surprised about the celebration of World Toilet Day and engaging in discussion around toilets which is seen as a taboo. There was lack of awareness about world toilet day celebration. Overall, the festival was covered by a local journalist and profiled in the local press. This festival was also relayed internationally online through Twitter, Facebook and the project’s webpage. In addition, voice recordings were captured from diverse perspectives (users, sanitation workers, researchers and practitioners) and curated as a collection of podcasts on (i) celebrating sanitation heroes, (ii) voicing an injustice or vision for sanitation justice, and (iii) addressing sanitation taboo. The festival contributed to generate new research questions and observations, as well as engagements which we are building upon in the ongoing research activities.