5,500 People and Two Toilets
A look at Sanitation in the Teshie-Demo area
An old friend invited me to take a look at the toilet situation in his neighborhood, Demo, when he found out about my research fellowship. Demo is a neighborhood in the coastal town of Teshie located in the Greater Accra region of Ghana about 16 kilometres from Accra Central. With a population of about 171,875 it is the ninth most populous town in Ghana.
Teshie is one of the towns in the Greater Accra region that lacks clean water and proper ways to dispose waste.
Although the Domo area has a population of around 5,480, and roughly one out of five homes have a toilet, there are only 4 public toilets, with only two functioning at the time of my visit.
One of the public toilets was dilapidated and unusable. I spoke to a man coming out of it and he reported that though it’s risky using the broken toilet, he had no option. The other is a brand new toilet that had been constructed in place of the dilapidated one. According to the residents, the new toilet was poorly constructed and totally broke down after 3 months.
The two functioning toilets
One, situated in the center of community is built in between houses and is about 10 steps for a chop bar (local restaurant). There is lack of ventilation and the place is swarmed with flies, the environment is unhygienic as food is sold right by the toilet. The caretaker of the toilet told me that to use the toilet, one needed to pay 40 and 50 Ghana pesewas respectively. Forty pesewas for old newspaper and Fifty pesewas for toilet paper.
The other working public toilet was built by one of the residents and has three stalls, with an additional two stalls under construction. The toilet looked very clean, comfortable to use and properly managed. It is a water closet but has a polytank outside with water for flushing and water and soap outside for hand-washing. According to the caretaker, about 60 people use the toilet daily, it costs 50 pesewas to use the toilet.
He said though he wished more people would use his facility, he understands that some prefer the other toilet because there’s an option to pay 40 pesewas there and his toilet is only open 9am to 9pm. On some days he may stay late and because he lives in the house where the toilet is situated, he would open for people to use if he happened to be around.
Few toilets at home
I asked the residents why they have houses that basically have no toilets, the answers I received point to the fact that most Landlords did not think that it was a priority to have toilets in their homes, those that did construct toilets did so at an extra cost at the expense of the tenants. I was also informed that the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) offered to build toilets for the households that did not have at half the cost; meaning the residents would pay half while AMA takes care of the other half. The residents did not seem to be enthused about this initiative, they felt that they should be receiving the toilets at no cost.
Making Due
Due to the lack of toilets in Teshie, people defecate in the standard black shopping bags and dispose them off; others also prefer to also dig holes in the ground and defecate if they can find a spot. A lot of people, however take advantage of Teshie’s proximity to the sea and defecate by the sea.
