Centre for Infectious Disease Research in
Zambia (CIDRZ) has awarded 12 landlords for improving their toilets
in Bauleni Compound under the organisation’s behavioural
change meetings dubbed ‘Indaba Yama Landlords’ (meeting
of landlords).
This is under the CIDRZ, in collaboration with the London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine project which is
aimed at ‘Sanitation Demand: Creating Demand for
Sanitation in Peri-urban Areas or SanDem.’
A total of 508 Landlords participated in Bauleni Compound
and each of them was asked to make four improvements to
their toilets:
• Initiate the ‘pamodzi’ cleaning rota for the toilets which
would involve the participation of all households within a
housing unit;
• Provide an inside lock to ensure privacy in the toilet;
• Provide an external lock to the toilet to ensure that toilets
are kept clean all the times and used responsibly; and
• Provide a cover pan to reduce the smell.
Meetings were held with landlords to sensitise them on the key issues including the building of improved toilets. Within
a period of four weeks, we saw great improvement as some landlords worked on all the four requirements and some
went further and bought modern fittings including cisterns, while others even started the process of constructing new
toilets. This elated the CIDRZ SanDem project who decided
to award the outstanding landlords with various prizes.
The SanDem project is funded by the U.K. Department for
International Development (DFID) under the Sanitation and
Hygiene Supply for Equity (SHARE) project.
The project is designed to create demand for sanitation in
peri-urban areas of Lusaka such as Bauleni Compound
through formative research, innovation, and intervention.
The aim is to determine how far a state-of-the-art
communication approach to behaviour change can enhance
demand for and acquisition of improved toilets in urban
Zambia.
Evidence shows that poor sanitation and exposure to human
excreta have been implicated in the transmission of many
infectious diseases including diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid,
intestinal worms, infectious hepatitis, trachoma among
many others.
Globally, diseases related to water and sanitation are one of
the major causes of death in children under five years old.
About 4 billion cases of diarrhoea occur per year, causing
1.8 million deaths among children under five. Therefore
improving sanitation is an effective and sustainable means
to reduce the risk of infection, the severity of infection, and
ultimately, morbidity and mortality.
The United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Health
Organization report that about 2.5 billion people have
inadequate toilets globally, and almost one billion defecate
in the open.
In Zambia, out of a population of ≈15 million, 5.6 million
have no safe toilets and 2.3 million defecate in the open.
No comments:
Post a Comment