The Ci+AU was commissioned to develop a cost-effective, environmentally sustainable, and gender-sensitive prototype toilet to enhance hygiene and safety among adolescent girls of a middle school. The broader goal was to promote dignity, inclusivity, and well-being in educational spaces.
Back in 2017, we had an opportunity to build a small and experimental toilet in Jhalokati, with the simple intention of helping adolescent girls in a rural school who had no real toilet to avail. We designed a cost-efficient, environment-friendly, safe, and sanitary toilet for them to access easily and to improve their menstrual hygiene. We also wanted to help them change their common perception of a toilet from a dark, dingy, and stigmatised space to a positive, light-filled, ventilated, and gender-friendly facility.
The toilet project soon evolved into a research topic, an opportunity to look at some of the typical social and hygiene-related problems that rural girls encounter at their schools. Our hope was that this prototype toilet project would change the attitudes of schoolteachers, parents, local community leaders, and even adolescent boys regarding specific health needs of girls. Furthermore, a gender-friendly toilet would improve the self-esteem of girls, enabling them to become more conscious and productive citizens.
A core concept of our toilet design was "no girl alone." Often girls feel reluctant to go to the solitary toilet facility at school because they are afraid that they would be harassed on the way to or once inside the toilet. Our solution for this problem was to provide three functions—toilets, ablution space, and handwashing—so that multiple girls can be inside the facility at the same time as mutual protection. The toilet includes a low-cost, key-based sanitary pad dispenser. Furthermore, our design proposes to use wastewater for the adjacent community vegetable garden that the girls will be responsible for maintaining. This way they will take ownership of the toilet, thereby feeling inspired to sustain it as best as they can. Maintenance of the facility in small teams is their responsibility.
We recognise that the toilet may change neither the misogynist culture of a rural school nor the shy world of adolescent girls. The toilet may even fall into disrepair and become a putrid place as elsewhere. To stop that from happening, we thought it would be important to tie the idea of toilet hygiene with curricular reform in such subjects as civic responsibility, environmental sustainability, gender studies, and conscientious use of water. These ideas, even if they are executed at a micro-scale, are intimately related to the nation's broader interests because schoolgirls will emerge as better human beings and, as mothers, also enlighten their progeny. We also believe that our small project can spur local initiatives for not just public health and wellbeing, but also social justice.