Household Toilet Construction
Small Change with a Big Impact
Owning and having access to her own toilet was a distant dream for Rita Ama Yeboah. “All my life I have been compelled to use a toilet which was also used by other people in my neighborhood,” she said. Due to this Rita was susceptible to diseases such as diarrhea, cholera, Hepatitis A and her worries exacerbated when she got pregnant with her first child.
The answer to her worries was in GHEI’s Mother Mentor for Child Development Program (MMCD). We constructed a toilet for Rita and her family. She is now able to protect her family from sickness, diseases and other threats. “The biggest positive is that I have my own toilet now. It is clean and I don’t encounter bad odor anymore,” she revealed with a smile.
Constructing toilets has helped reduce the spread of infections especially in pregnant mothers and provided them with access to a private sanitation facility. In 2019, we adopted an eco-friendlier approach by constructing bio-digester toilets. Biodigester toilets digest organic solids in an ecologically friendly way and are a maintenance-free system. They prevent human waste and untreated water from contaminating groundwater. Since there are no existing sewage systems in the community, our solution is a good alternative to open defecation.
So far, we’ve built three such toilets and will continue to build more in our community.
