Heather Bellamy spoke with Lorraine Kingsley about how toilets are helping people escape poverty.

Lorraine Kingsley

Two point five billion people don't have somewhere safe, clean, or hygienic to go to the toilet and one in 11 children in sub-Saharan Africa doesn't make their fifth birthday, with diarrhoea being one of the main killers. Toilet Twinning is a charity aimed at helping those in desperate poverty to have access to a proper toilet, clean water and the information they need to be healthy. To find out more Heather Bellamy spoke with CEO, Lorraine Kingsley.

Heather: So what exactly is toilet twinning and how does it work?

Lorraine: Toilet twinning is twinning your toilet. Most of us have heard of twinning towns, where we see signposts to the entrance to a town that says, "This town is twinned with..." and then often they have the name of a town that's abroad. So we thought, let's twin toilets! So a £60 donation goes to fund water and sanitation projects in 25 countries around the world. You then get a certificate to hang in your loo that shows a picture of a latrine. At the moment we've got about 15 countries where we've got photos of the latrines from our partners and so you choose which country you want to twin with and then you get the certificate with the picture of the latrine that you're twinned with and your toilet is twinned.

Heather: What nations do you work in?

Afghanistan

Lorraine: We are across Africa and Asia, so it's countries like Afghanistan, Burundi, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nepal and Uganda. In Afghanistan it takes 14 days to take the materials in by horseback, so they are amazingly remote communities. On the photos you can see the snow-capped mountains in the background and then if you choose somewhere like Uganda or Gambia you've got the classic African red soil and beautiful little thatched roof latrines, so it's very different depending on the countries you twin with.

Heather: Going to the toilet is something we don't think about; we've got flushes, the water and everything we need. Can you describe what living conditions are like for those who don't have somewhere hygienic to go to the toilet, because a lot of us wouldn't be able to imagine what it's like?

Lorraine: Absolutely. We do a lot of assemblies at schools about toilet twinning because schools love us. It's an opportunity to talk about toilets and the thing I say to children is that you can't get out of poverty unless you have a toilet. It's that simple. You need clean water and you need a toilet as one of the absolute fundamental building blocks to get out of poverty, because the simple fact is that if you haven't got clean water and you haven't got a toilet, then you are going to get sick from a diarrhoea related disease. This is especially true in the rainy season when water sources get contaminated. You've got water sources being contaminated because of people not having a latrine to go to the toilet in. You have got open defecation happening and then flies contaminating peoples food as they eat. So you've got children missing out on school because they are sick and then not getting a decent education; you've got adults not being able to work in their fields because they are sick and so they're not producing enough food to feed their family, they're not producing surplus food to sell at market and so you just cannot break that loop, that generational poverty if you have got children and families continually in a cycle of sickness.

It is horrific how many children under the age of five still die due to diarrhoea disease and so when you have got that level of poverty going on from something as basic as a toilet - that's I think why toilet twinning captures people's imagination. They see a certificate, like we have neighbours or friends that come and use our downstairs loo, they see the picture and it sparks a conversation. We've had so many of our friends go on to twin their own toilets as a result because they want to have similar conversations with their friends, because it is so tangible and so simple to make such a huge difference.

Heather: Can you tell us some of the stories of the difference you have made in those countries?

Bishwo outside latrine

Lorraine: Yes. We've got a film on our website of a family in Nepal. Bishwo is a retired teacher. We work with local partners and they build relationships. What they do is the local partner goes into the village and they do a needs assessment. They find out there are very few, (or none in the case of Bishwo's community), no families that have got a toilet. So they start bringing people together to talk in workshops and in a lot of countries this is completely new to them. They are head down trying to make a living, trying to make things work and desperately poor, spending all their time growing crops. So getting together with their neighbours and talking about problems and trying to find solutions is something they just don't do. So when a local partner, or a facilitator comes into a community and says, I'm going to run some workshops and we are all going to sit down and talk about better farming practices, we are going to talk about clean water and building a simple latrine, for Bishwo this was a light bulb moment. He suddenly got it and he said to me when I met him, "I realised not only why my family were sick, but I realised that I was contaminating the water source of my neighbours, because my pit latrine was situated over a stream". When he realised that that wasn't just affecting his family's health, but his neighbours were getting sick too because of him, he sold two goats and raised the money that he needed by selling the goats to build a latrine. Then he held an open day for his toilet where he got all the community to come and see his toilet and to use it, which I just love. I love the image that conjures up in my mind when he tells me that they formed a queue and he showed them how to use his loo. Then they've gone on to build their own toilets as a result, because he has become an advocate for this within his own local community as a result of hearing about it from a facilitator. Now his children are in school all the time and he says they haven't been sick once in the rainy season. That phenomenal transformation occurs through something so simple.

Heather: So the main work that you do, is it mainly teaching and then these people go on to do the physical work, or do you go in and do the plumbing etc.? What do you do physically on the ground?

India

Lorraine: We do both. Primarily wherever possible we will do the example that you first used. We will use education and we will say, "This is the difference it will make" and we will hopefully get everyone to that 'light bulb' moment where they go, "Oh, I get it, I see the link between sanitation and health. I will build my own toilet and I will use it".

There have been loads of studies done that if it is led by the community and if people own the solution, then they will go on to use a toilet. Whereas if a toilet is built for them as part of a government scheme, or if an NGO comes in and builds a ton of toilets without any explanation, or an education programme, or hygiene principals such as washing your hands, if that isn't part of it, then people will just carry on using the local streams, or using a bucket, or just doing whatever they have done, because that's what they know.

I was talking to a church locally to me about this and a lady came up to me afterwards and said, "I remember when in the UK, the government put in baths in people's homes. People just used it as storage for their coal, because they didn't really want a bath. No-one had asked them if they wanted a bath and it just got put in and so they didn't use it for that purpose." She said she could completely understand about the principals that we employ. That's why it doesn't work to build things for people, because if they have built it themselves and it's cost them a little bit, even if it is subsidised or we have gone in and we've given the technical know-how about where to site it and how to put the slab in and to build the pit so it is deep enough, there's obviously all that, that we provide people, but if they build the toilet themselves they will go on to use it.