Papua New Guinea update

the ATloo during construction at a school in the Eastern Highlands.

Credit: WaterAid Australia

24 October 2005

WaterAid's International Program Manager, Peter Dwan, has recently returned from a fact finding mission in PNG.

While there he reviewed the outcomes and lessons learnt from WaterAid Australia's first completed project in the Eastern Highlands of PNG and began planning for future projects.

WaterAid Australia is working in conjunction with ATprojects (based in Goroke, PNG) and Oxfam NZ to provide water, sanitation and hygiene education to schools in the Eastern Highlands.

Background

The PNG Government, due to limited resources, is unable to support the construction of primary and community schools. As such, communities have to find the funds to construct schools themselves and have to follow construction guidelines provided by the government.

Funds for schools come from a variety of sources, including politician's development funds, JIKA, AusAID and from other international NGOs. The Government funds the salaries of teachers and a small operating grant per student but there is little if any resources available for teaching materials and the other operational and maintenance costs involved in the running of a school. As a result, few schools have water and sanitation facilities constructed on their grounds.

The Basic Education Development Project (BEDP) has supported the publication of national guidelines for schools and will soon provide annual maintenance grants of 1,000-5,000Kina to school management boards.

But even with this money, most schools have to charge attendance fees which often amount to one third of the average income for a family. At Korofegu Primary School, fees are currently at 200K per student and a family typically receives around 600K per year for coffee cash crops. It costs 800K per year to send a student to the local high school, so often hard choices need to made by parents about which of their children, if any, attend. As a result girls are often not sent to school beyond a certain age as they are likely to be married and live with their husband's family.

WaterAid Australia's PNG Schools' Project

ATprojects has a plan to install water and sanitation services in all 216 primary/community schools in the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea at a rate of about 10-12 per year. Most schools have either no toilets or very poor pit latrines with squatting slabs and poor superstructures.

Ferro-cement tanks are used for rainwater harvesting primarily to maximise community involvement and local work rather than buy imported plastic tanks.

Credit: WaterAid Australia

ATprojects has designed the ATloo to sit high off the ground to keep excreta away from people's bodies. The inside slope of the seat has been set at 40 degrees so excrement does not get caught on the sides so little cleaning is required. It has footpads and a ventilation pipe to control any odour. ATprojects takes a participatory approach and although it constructs the superstructure frames in their workshop it is the community that assembles them on site. For every log used in the construction six trees are planted to ensure sustainability.

General Findings

All ATloos were very well constructed, very clean, and well used. There was no evidence of open defecation outside in the surrounding bush indicating good usage rates.

It was clear that the toilets are highly valued by all schools. In fact they are often the best buildings in the school and are sited close to roads to show off the development and improvements the schools is undertaking.

The finished products are something that the schools can be proud of.

Credit: WaterAid Australia

The design of the latrines allows them to be kept very clean so they need less maintenance and by locking of the latrines and the holding of the keys by teachers also ensures misuse does not occur.

The importance of the hand washing tap being located near the latrines needs to be emphasised. Unfortunately some schools had sited their latrines on a slope above the school making it difficult to install water for washing hands close by. One suggestion was to place an elevated half barrel container with a tap near the latrines which could be filled each day by student monitors. ATprojects will ensure that future ATloos in new schools would be built down hill from schools so that water could be delivered close to the toilets by a gravity flow system.

Some taps were fitted with a special self-closing tap to reduce water wastage. However this makes hand washing more difficult as one hand can only be washed at each time therefore different types of taps should be used in future.

All in all the ATloos look good and function well and are resources that the schools are proud to have. These improvements in sanitation and the subsequent health benefits should make a lasting difference to the lives of the schoolchildren in the Eastern Province.

Article and images by Peter Dwan