The Department of Basic Education (DBE) has failed to meet their target of eradicating pit latrines by 2023, delaying this date to 2025. Doubts are beginning to form regarding whether or not the Department will meet this new target, while thousands of our public schools continue to face health and safety issues.
Pit toilets have posed serious threats to the safety of school children across the country. These dangerous ablution facilities have resulted in a number of young children drowning, leading to urgent calls for the Department to promptly demolish them in all schools.
DBE Minister, Angie Motshekga, claims that in 1996 the Department assessed the infrastructure at our public schools and concluded that approximately 9 000 schools were reliant on basic pit toilets.
Launch of SAFE Initiative
In 2018, the Department launched the Sanitation Appropriate For Education (SAFE) initiative with the aim of replacing all basic pit toilets with appropriate sanitation in accordance with the Norms and Standards for school infrastructure. In many cases, this would involve ventilated, improved pit toilets where water-borne sanitisation is not available. At this stage, it was found that there were 3 898 schools still dependent on basic pit toilets.
A number of these remaining schools were found to unviable or small and were subsequently closed, while additional schools were also added to the list, further reducing this number to 3 397. The SAFE initiative has already completed sanitation projects at 2 547 schools, leaving 850 schools still forced to use basic pit toilets.
The Minister claims that these remaining schools have been assigned to implementing agents which are scheduled for completion by the end of the 2023/24 financial year. The Minister also reveals that the schools where these pit toilets have been improved are responsible for maintaining and de-sludging them themselves.
Number of improved pit toilets by province
A list of the number of schools with ventilated improved pit toilets by province was also provided by the Department as follows:
- Eastern Cape - 2 148
- Free State - 71
- Gauteng - 15
- KwaZulu-Natal - 2 639
- Limpopo - 2 353
- Mpumalanga - 863
- Northern Cape - 109
- North West - 174
- Western Cape - 4
The eradication of the remaining pit toilets will cost the Government approximately R2.4 million per school. Flush toilets will be installed where access to water is available, however dry-sanitation solutions and ventilated, improved pit toilets will be installed in instances where this is not possible.
South African schools have faced sanitation challenges for years, and while significant improvement has been made over time, the Department is consistently failing to meet their own deadlines of eradicating pit toilets altogether.
