Johannesburg – The return of primary school pupils this week has again brought the spotlight back to the severe shortage of basic sanitation, with some schools still subjected to unhygienic conditions and unsafe ablution facilities endangering pupils’ lives.
Eastern Cape, Limpopo and KwaZulu – Natal continue to lead the pack of primary schools with poor sanitation facilities, which have rendered proper teaching and learning impossible.
The outbreak of Covid-19 has exacerbated the problem.
“School sanitation is a historic problem and we have addressed this with the department on num er ous occasion s, but they complain of budgetary constraints.
“There are schools without toilets or water. Besides this, there is also a long-standing issue of overcrowding throughout the province. It’s just impossible to maintain social distancing,” said SA Democratic Teachers Union Eastern Cape secretary Chris Mdingi.
According to Passmark, a project focusing on education data for accountability, there were about 8 679 schools across the country that still use unsafe toilets.
About 1 426 of these schools are in the Eastern Cape and more than two-thirds are primary schools. The National Teachers Union (Natu) said that it was inundated daily with calls from school principals in different provinces who wanted to know what they should do.
“In KwaZulu-Natal, we have learners who are using nearby bushes to relieve themselves because the pit toilets are either full or are non-existent. When Covid-19 hit us last year, there were schools that were allocated chemical mobile toilets. But because of a contractual dispute between the department and the service provider, they were removed. Though the problem of inadequate sanitation is across the board, primary schools, especially in rural districts, are severely impacted,” said Cynthia Barnes, Natu’s general secretary.
“Female learners are mainly at the receiving end of this failure to provide sanitation by the department. Female learners are losing precious schooling time because they have to skip classes when it is that time of the month because there are no facilities to accommodate their needs,” she said.
The national department has set itself an ambitious deadline that by the end of 2022 pit latrines will have been eradicated in all schools. Section 27, a non-profit organisation that has been in the forefront of ensuring that the department accounts for its failure to provide safe and hygienic ablution facilities for pupils, told Sunday World that it was not easy to track what progress was made to eradicate pit latrines.
“The minimum norms and standards for school infrastructure state that all schools had to be provided with sanitation by 2016, and that schools were to be provided with adequate and safe toilets by 2020, but we know that hundreds of schools in Limpopo still rely on unlawful pit latrines. The problem is not isolated to Limpopo alone,” said Section 27 spokesperson Julia Chaskalson.
She said the failure of government to deal with the problem violated pupils’ rights to basic education, equality and dignity.
The director-general of the Department of Education, Matanzima Mweli, said progress had been made.
“I have resolved that come the 2022/23 financial year, you will not have pit latrines anymore in this country. The department has since stepped up the monitoring of the projects to ensure that they are completed on time.
“The monitoring function has assisted the department to unblock challenges and resolve issues that delayed the building process,” said Mweli.
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