No toilet, no “aure”: Toilets become a requirement for marriage

Bachelors in some rural northern Nigerian villages must meet one condition before they “yi aure”—Hausa word for “marry”: they first must own a house.

It is as easy as the community marking out a piece of land. Or the family tracing a portion of an existing family land.

Fellow young men pool their physical strength and resources with that of the would-be groom. In days or weeks, the house is done—and the groom is ready for marriage.

But rural communities in Jigawa are adding a twist to that set-up: the house must have a toilet.

Bandutse Tsangaya, a village of hundreds in Kazaure local government area, is leading a charge that compels young men to not only have a house but have a toilet put in before they are eligible to be called grooms.

In Bandutse, the toilet comes before the house.

“That’s the first work I dig when I started building my house,” says Ibrahim Mahmud. “I started with digging the pit.”

His one wife and three sons live in the family home in Bandutse, a Kazaure community nearly three hours by road from the capital Dutse but minutes away from Kano city.

Man in the pit. Bandutse residents begin work to add toilets to their homes

Calling out the shame

Historically, residents in rural communities defecated in the open—in bushes, rivers, on farmlands, any convenient surface.

Now a toilet has become a matter of both dignity and health care, and Bandutse is calling out the shame.

“It is shameful for a bachelor to have a wife going into the open to defecate,” says Mahmud.

 “A wife is expected not to go outside to defecate. Every bachelor of this community start [building] a latrine before the house.”

The “ba shiga” (no entry) custom practised in many northern communities prevents women from leave the household. Having to go outdoors to take care of bodily function is a challenge.

Homemakers Hadiza Ali and Hassana Adamu have lived with the challenges of not owning a toilet for years. Their homes are near the main road that goes through Bandutse.

“How could we go out,” Ali says. “The [highway] is so close. How can we go out and say we want to poo around the place. How would one remove their clothes and want to do that?”

But many rural—and urban—residents have no choice.

Some 46 million Nigerians still defecate in the open, says the United Nations Children’s Fund. Nearly double that number of Nigerians have mobile phones. The race is on to eliminate it by 2025.

The health consequences of a lack of toilets on the population are huge. A lack of toilets has been named a leading cause of illness and death among children.

Diarrhoea, associated with poor sanitary condition, and respiratory infections resulting from poor hygiene kill up to 400,000 children aged under five every year, according to the Fund.

Bandutse changed that after Jigawa state government opted into the Water Sector and Sanitation Sector Reform Project. Funded by the European Union, its second phase was extended to cover two local government areas—Kazaure and Gumel. Under the project each gets 50 ventilated improved pit latrines this year.

Mallam Madori and Taura local governments have been in the project for longer—and helped to kick-start Jigawa’s new relationship with toilets.

Bandutse men on intense sanitation to end open defecation

‘Triggered”

Residents have taken centre stage in their community’s race to be declared open defecation free. This community-led move for total sanitation is called “triggering”.

Men, women and youth gather in separate groups, facilitated by local experts in water, sanitation and hygiene.

In separate groups, residents in Garin Mano community of Mallam Madori mapped their village.

Babandi Alhassan, coordinator for water, sanitation and hygiene in Mallam Madori was among facilitators who worked with residents of Garin Mano. He also did a baseline assessment of the community far back in 2013.

“We asked them where they defecate; they pointed. We asked how many were getting sick. They figured in money spent on hospitalisation,” he says

The areas identified had flies. Hens roamed the community. Wind and water were also considered.

All of this “carries [excreta] back into the community. When fowls scratch the ground, they transfer it back into homes. You get vomiting, diarrhoea, cholera,” says Alhassan.

“Then the light shone,” he recalls of the eureka moment of realisation. “They were eating their shit. As a facilitator, you never show them the way out. People understood the way out was to build a latrine. They chose a latrine.”

It took active natural leaders of the community—a man engaging men, a woman engaging women.

It also took three children to turn the tide on open defecation. Their task was to name and shame in song anyone they find defecating in the open.

“An hana kashi a dawa,” they would chant at perpetrators. In Hausa it meant, “Don’t defecate in the bush.”

Workers start construction on Bandutse’s first public convenience and complete (below) it in record time

 A growing lesson

When Bandutse in Kazaure reached that point, it never went back. Men, women and youth banded into committees for water, sanitation and hygiene to blitzkrieg the village in sanitation.

They identified defecation spots, mopped up refuse to the last clumps of faeces and sand, raked their topsoil, moved dried-out grasses that concealed clumps of faeces and set all on fire.

The committee leads village-wide sanitation every week: the men clean outdoors; the women visit homes to see how wives and mothers handle home hygiene.

“Before now, at the back of houses, you see [faeces]. Now you can’t see that,” says grandmother Ali, who leads the women sanitation effort. Now each house has a toilet of their own.”

Seated beside her, Hassana Adamu notes how even children don’t have to go in the bushes.

“They do it in the house. Now that we have toilets in the house,” she says.

Hadiza Ali (in white) convenes women at the home of the village head to discuss hygiene

It took residents a week of pooled effort to add latrines to existing homes. They also pooled to build for the vulnerable and elderly who owned homes but couldn’t endure the labour.

Then they went one step further: they built a public latrine at the entrance to the community, where visitors or anyone else going through could relieve themselves when pressed to answer the call of nature.

The public latrine is sited near a spot that used to be popular for urinating and defecating. Now a large sign in red spells “An hana kashi anan (No defecation here) and an arrow points to the public latrine.

Ibrahim Yahaya, who chairs the water, sanitation and hygiene committee, is proud of Bandutse’s achievement.

“Imagine defecating outside at night even in the day—it is dangerous,” he says. He is thinking of encounters with crawling reptiles while squatting to do business. “Now we don’t defecate outside. We have latrines in every house.”

“Are you saying each house has a latrine,” he is asked.

“You want to see?” he challenges.

Toilets in Garin Mano can be as simple as a hole in the ground but the village controls where its faeces goes

“It is important”

In Garin Mano, Hindatu Ibrahim leads women in water, sanitation and hygiene.

“We enter homes to teach about hygiene, handwashing with soap and water after using the toilet, before eating, how to take care of your body, keep your environment clean inside and outside,” she says.

“It is important. If not people will get germs into their food and cause illness. As a mother I will not be happy to hear about cholera.”

Residents say stories of people falling ill due to water-borne diseases have become rarer. Alhassan is proud to confess the last time he took his child to hospital was for teething pains.

Jigawa state government is concerned about maintaining sanitation gains across its local governments. It has maintained a record of commitment counterpart funds—even to mop up grants neighbouring Kano cannot match, experts say.

Its partnership on the water, sanitation and hygiene project goes back more than 10 years, only 22 of its 27 local government areas are covered, says Labaran Adamu, managing director of Jigawa’s Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Agency, which implements the project.

It even has a budget line for water, sanitation and hygiene—up to N3.4 billion allocated last year and N3.3 billion this year—to make up for donor absence in five council areas left out.

Water, sanitation and hygiene is alongside seven sectors—like health and education—to get “priority consideration” in budget allocation under the state’s medium-term sector strategy, says Adamu.

“We are trying to manage what we have, but I cannot say it is enough. What we use for our budget is [the envelope method]. We have to work within that amount provided.”

Council authorities are pushing to keep communities free of open defecation, says Shehu Suleiman, head of water, sanitation and hygiene department in Kazaure local government area.

The council alone has 105 environmental health officers—33 of them female sanitary inspectors who can enter homes when male visitors are not allowed in across rural northern villages.

“You don’t need anyone to tell you to clean your space,” says grandmother Hadiza Ali. “It is for good health. You always have to keep your surroundings clean and we want to continue doing that. Nobody hates hygiene.”

And young grooms and brides like it even better.