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The making and unmaking of sanitation taboos across urban Africa. The OVERDUE project.
Panel P56 at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
Gendered taboos ruling the use of toilets, bodily norms, and sanitation work reinforce gender hierarchies quietly undermining equitable sanitation pathways. This session explores the making and unmaking of sanitation taboos across urban Africa, and their multidimensional effects on women and girls.
Long Abstract:
Multiple gendered taboos surrounding the use of toilets, bodily norms, and access to sanitation work and infrastructure reinforce gender hierarchies through social norms and public policies. The ways in which certain sanitation experiences and practices are rendered taboo undermine the pursuit of equitable sanitation pathways. Despite the commitment expressed by African leaders through the 2015 Ngor Declaration, to achieve universal access to adequate and sustainable sanitation and hygiene services and eliminate open defecation by 2030 - later endorsed by the international community as part of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 – sanitation continues to be treated as a ‘taboo’, an unspoken subject across almost every culture. We talk, plan and manage cities and urban life as if faeces and urine were not part of them, but rather an unpleasant topic rarely tackled in its own right and complexity and pushed aside in favour of clean water, water-based sewage systems and water-intensive hygiene practices.
Drawing from accounts across Freetown (Sierra Leone), Mwanza (Tanzania), Beira (Mozambique) and other cities in Senegal, Madagascar, Ivory Coast and DRC, this session will explore the making and unmaking of sanitation taboos across urban Africa, investigating the institutions and structures perpetrating taboos, their materialization into infrastructure and spatial practices, and their multidimensional effects on women and girls. Adopting a feminist perspective, we aim to instigate a collective discussion on how traditional and modern taboos work to regulate bodies, behaviour, daily life, and the relation with the material world drawing invisible lines between the desirable and undesirable, cleanliness and dirt, decency and indecency, what is allowed and suppressed.
In terms of format, the session will draw on three to four short video clips (total 15 min) produced by the OVERDUE project’s team and based on their original work and external contributors. These videos will be introduced by the chair and used to prompt contributions and discussion with participants. These will be facilitated through a collective online space (Jamboard) (15 min). One or two discussants will close the session drawing on their experience and work to advance just sanitation (10 min).
This presentation explores the unspoken rules and constraints faced by women and girls when using public toilets in the city of Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and the deep gender impacts such rules have on their practical and strategic needs.
Taboos surrounding first menstruation affect girls, who are conforming with traditional ceremonies and adapt their everyday practices, as well as household members which must provide particular infrastructures. This presentation discusses these taboos and their consequences in cities of Mozambique.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation examines the taboos surrounding first menstruation and sanitation and their consequences for women in cities of Mozambique.
We organized workshops and interviews with women to discuss their experiences and practices regarding sanitation. Throughout these interactions, several taboos surrounding menstruation and the first menstrual cycle were repeatedly mentioned by elders. These include the need to build separate facilities for menstruating women, to hide menstrual products and blood especially from men, and interdiction to perform specific activities such as cooking, sexual intercourse and leaving the house.
In the public sphere, these taboos are described as ancient and no longer in use, or limited to distant rural areas, especially by adult women and men seeking to present themselves as "modern." In practice, however, we noticed that handling menstruation remains confined to women, and cultural norms persists, both as a topic and process that has considerable influence on how menstruation is dealt with.
Our findings point to the need to discuss more openly menstruation, as a process, a series of needs, and a practice to be included in infrastructural and social considerations in order to advance just sanitation from a gender perspective.
The sanitation crisis in unregulated informal settlements in Mwanza are compounded by statutory provisions & social norms. This presentation examines how regulatory frameworks impact local communities undermining just sanitation. Participatory/contextual adaption of regulatory framework is critical.
Paper long abstract:
The challenges associated with the sanitation crisis in the rapidly urbanizing and unregulated informal settlements of Sub-Saharan African cities are compounded by sanitation taboos, which are deeply gendered and remain unexplored. Focusing on a qualitative study of Mwanza city in Tanzania, this presentation examines how gendered sanitation taboos impact differently on women and men, girls and boys, affecting in turn their pathways to just sanitation. The sanitation taboos explored refer to human waste and hygiene issues that are generally publicly avoided or unspoken to avoid embarrassment.
The manifestation of sanitation taboos in Mwanza include: Discomfort among women to be seen by men when they use communal toilets; reluctance among elderly men to use off-site sanitation facilities on account of not knowing what will happen to their excreta; social cultural norms and values which restrain men from direct engagement with their daughters about sanitation and hygiene matters; or taking responsibilities or matters of cleaning of sanitation facilities.
The paper concludes that just sanitation requires gendered interventions that addresses social cultural norms and taboos at households and community levels. Besides, there is a need to advance the current debate among academia, practitioners, policy makers and wider communities on matters that encircle sanitation, social cultural norms, discriminatory values and taboos.
Menstruation and taboo is the deepest form of patriarchy. Through a feasibility study conducted in South Sudan, using a mixed-methods approach, data were collected which represented how women suffer due to a lack of hygiene products, knowledge, and awareness of Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM)
Paper long abstract:
Multiple gendered taboos that affect women and their overall health are normal amongst countries with a patriarchal setup. One among those is South Sudan's two counties - Ayod and Fangak - where we conducted our research to introspect the current COVID-19 scenario and their annual floods - and its impact on women's health. More than the pandemic, the flood situation is said to have changed the dynamics of hygiene practices. The research, that includes data from household surveys (n=462), KIIs (19), and FGDs (n=6), helped us to understand the situation that has led to an increase in vulnerabilities among the community members towards hazards that have ultimately given rise to health issues, WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) - collectively.
Menstrual health was widely reported as a 'development needs' given 60.1% of female respondents said that they did not use any menstrual hygiene materials while 17.6% reported using old clothes or rags as a substitute for menstrual pads. This is the long-stuck taboos around the topic of menstrual hygiene which forces women to bury their menstrual waste in order 'hide' it from their men in the family.
To eliminate the said taboos, 23.19% of female respondents suggested that menstrual hygiene awareness provided to their spouses would help them deal with menstrual hygiene in a 'culturally' and 'respectfully' open situation. While the others claimed that the information on usage and disposal of sanitary pads and counselling support might be useful to better manage their menstrual hygiene needs.
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Short Abstract:
Gendered taboos ruling the use of toilets, bodily norms, and sanitation work reinforce gender hierarchies quietly undermining equitable sanitation pathways. This session explores the making and unmaking of sanitation taboos across urban Africa, and their multidimensional effects on women and girls.
Long Abstract:
Multiple gendered taboos surrounding the use of toilets, bodily norms, and access to sanitation work and infrastructure reinforce gender hierarchies through social norms and public policies. The ways in which certain sanitation experiences and practices are rendered taboo undermine the pursuit of equitable sanitation pathways. Despite the commitment expressed by African leaders through the 2015 Ngor Declaration, to achieve universal access to adequate and sustainable sanitation and hygiene services and eliminate open defecation by 2030 - later endorsed by the international community as part of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 – sanitation continues to be treated as a ‘taboo’, an unspoken subject across almost every culture. We talk, plan and manage cities and urban life as if faeces and urine were not part of them, but rather an unpleasant topic rarely tackled in its own right and complexity and pushed aside in favour of clean water, water-based sewage systems and water-intensive hygiene practices.
Drawing from accounts across Freetown (Sierra Leone), Mwanza (Tanzania), Beira (Mozambique) and other cities in Senegal, Madagascar, Ivory Coast and DRC, this session will explore the making and unmaking of sanitation taboos across urban Africa, investigating the institutions and structures perpetrating taboos, their materialization into infrastructure and spatial practices, and their multidimensional effects on women and girls. Adopting a feminist perspective, we aim to instigate a collective discussion on how traditional and modern taboos work to regulate bodies, behaviour, daily life, and the relation with the material world drawing invisible lines between the desirable and undesirable, cleanliness and dirt, decency and indecency, what is allowed and suppressed.
In terms of format, the session will draw on three to four short video clips (total 15 min) produced by the OVERDUE project’s team and based on their original work and external contributors. These videos will be introduced by the chair and used to prompt contributions and discussion with participants. These will be facilitated through a collective online space (Jamboard) (15 min). One or two discussants will close the session drawing on their experience and work to advance just sanitation (10 min).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 7 July, 2022, -Neule Angèle Koué (GEPALEF - Genre Parité Leadership Féminin)
Catarina Simões Mavila Magaia (Austral) Hélder Domingos (Associação FACE de Água e Saneamento)
Wilbard Kombe
Aishwarya Iyer (ETCH Consultancy Services) Nitesh Lohan (Environment, Technology and Community Health) Sneha Krishnan (Jindal Global University)