By Solomon Tembang Mforgham, Africanews reporter in Limbe, Cameroon

It has been revealed that seven in ten women in sub-Saharan Africa have no access to a safe toilet, threatening their health and exposing them to shame, fear and even violence.

This means that 297 million African women and girls lack safe and adequate sanitation and of those 107 million don’t have a toilet at all.

This revelation is contained in the result of a survey commissioned by WaterAid of women living across five slums in Lagos, Nigeria, which showed that one in five had first or second hand experience of verbal harassment and intimidation, or had been threatened or physically assaulted in the last year when going to the toilet. Anecdotal evidence from other African countries suggests that the scale of the problem may be much larger than this.

The Chief Executive of WaterAid, Barbara Frost, is quoted in a press release issued by the organization as saying “when women don’t have a safe, secure and private place to go to the toilet they are exposed and put in a vulnerable position and when they relieve themselves in the open they risk harassment. Women are reluctant to talk about it or complain, but the world cannot continue to ignore this.”

“Adequate sanitation, coupled with access to clean, safe water to drink, transforms lives, improving health, safety and productivity. Governments are urged to take action and invest in access to sanitation and water,” she added.

Meanwhile, the release states that other studies from Uganda and Kenya show that such experiences of fear, indignity and violence appear to be common in Africa wherever women lack access to safe and adequate sanitation.

The press release also quotes Sandimhia Renato, 18, from Mozambique who walks 15 minutes every day to defecate in the bush as saying “sometimes when I go I feel ashamed and go back without defecating. Sometimes I wait until dark to go there so no one can see me. I will be very concerned about Diani, my daughter, going to the bush because it is so far from here. At night it is very dangerous. People get killed. A woman and a boy were killed with knives. One woman I know of has been raped.”

Security came out as a recurring concern in the poll of women from slums in Lagos, with 67% of respondents saying they feel unsafe even using shared or community toilets in a public place.

Poor hygiene, it would be noted, has serious implications on health. Every day, over 1,000 African mothers reportedly lose a child to diarrhoeal diseases caused by a lack of adequate sanitation and clean water.
Lack of decent sanitation also affects productivity and livelihoods. Women and girls living in sub-Saharan Africa without toilet facilities spend 20 billion hours each year finding a place to go in the open, according to WaterAid.

The poll in Nigeria commissioned by WaterAid was carried out by international polling and research company GlobeScan in the slums of Lagos, between 18 and 22 October 2012. It interviewed 500 women about their experiences of and around sanitation. The survey was conducted in five slum areas; Ajegunle, Ijora, Badia, Oko Agbon and Otto-Oyingbo.

Some of the other poll results found that: the most common location for women accessing sanitation facilities was ‘informal outside location’ (40%) as compared to a toilet within their own home (33%), public toilet in the area where they live (19%) or public toilet at their place of work (6%); 68% of women agreed that the cost of accessing public toilets was a problem for them; 61% of women agreed that the public toilets that they normally used were unhygienic; 98% of women stated that compared to other priorities such as spending on education or transport infrastructure, felt that it was either very important (89%) or somewhat important (9%) for the Nigerian Government to invest in sanitation as a way to improve your health, safety and livelihood.