Floating School Toilet
This month, four WTO staff members, along with representatives from philanthropic foundation Transparent Fish Fund and sanitary equipment specialist Wirquin, returned to the floating villages in Tonle Sap, Cambodia to follow up on all the great work Wetlands Work! (WW!) is doing to install floating toilets and introduce sanitation and hygiene education in six schools. During WTO’s visit to Mechrey and Prek Toal Primary Schools, we saw the floating toilets (a big improvement from the previous open hole in the ground!) and hygiene classes that focus on improving hand-washing habits. In addition to learning a new hand-washing song, each student received a soap bar from the Eco-Soap Bank and practiced washing their hands at the schools’ designated hand-washing stations.
While WW! has been working extensively in Tonle Sap’s floating schools, the organization is now trying to get individual households to install toilets, which cost $140 USD per household. In order to drive demand for the HandyPods, WW! has held sanitation raffles where 14 households won free HandyPods (11 of which have been installed). They are currently collecting feedback from these households to determine how to encourage more households to install toilets. Our team was impressed with WW!’s efforts in the region and we look forward to watching their progress on future visits.