Under the slogan Tuesdays for Toilets, arche noVa is launching a social media campaign on 19 November that will publish stories from the edge of the glasses every Tuesday. The stories will either be about people from all over the world who report about their hygiene needs or there will be a special regional reference; of course, there will also be facts and figures about water, sanitation and hygiene or sometimes a curious toilet story. In any case, there are enough reasons to take a closer look into the dirty corner for a while.
After all, for almost three decades now, arche noVa has been building toilets and latrines all over the world, wherever there is a need: barrier-free ones in Indonesia, flood-proof ones in Pakistan, clean-running ones in eastern Ukraine, makeshift ones in Cox's Bazar, made of stone, bamboo or wood, with buckets, brooms or even washbasins with a flower motif, for sitting or squatting, with toilet paper holders or water points. There are no limits to the variety. As different as the people in the world are, as different are their habits of doing their little or big business.
The sheer mass of toilet motifs, however, easily conceals the fact that a large proportion of people still have no sanitation at all, let alone their own toilet. To draw attention to this fact, World Toilet Day was proclaimed in 2001. Every year on 19 November, it is supposed to remind us that the global sustainability goal No. 6 is far from being achieved - clean water and basic sanitation for every human being everywhere in the world. We at arche noVa are campaigning for exactly this. In our work as an international aid organisation, the issues of sanitation and hygiene, directly related to water, are a central concern.
With our campaign Tuesdays for Toilets we want to emphasise this once again. If you want to read more than just a few lines on the topic, we recommend our current blog post on ONE.org, which also appears on World Toilet Day. Or the guest commentary by our managing director Mathias Anderson in the Mittelbayrischen Zeitung.
