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File image: A pit toilet at a school in South Africa.
Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube says the backlog in getting rid of pit toilets at schools, will be eradicated by next year.
She was speaking at an event where 22 low-cost flush toilets have been built at the Deda Primary School in the deep rural Ozwathini area between oThongathi and Wartburg in KwaZulu-Natal. These toilets replace six pit toilets that 700 learners have been using for years now.
The new toilets were built at a cost of just under R1-million by NGO, Breadline Africa.
Gwarube says government has eliminated about 92 percent of the pit toilet backlog at about 4 000 schools countrywide.
“In the next couple of weeks we will be making an announcement about a monitoring tool that we want to use. Because it’s not enough to simply say you have cleared a backlog. Things like infrastructure is something that you have to have a continuous look on, you have to have live data which tells you where they are cropping up, where there are pit toilets. So, in a couple of weeks’ time I will be very excited to be announcing how we will be monitoring once this backlog has been dealt with.”
Meanwhile, Public Works and Infrastructure Minister Dean Macpherson says his department will be working with the Department of Basic Education, as well as other spheres of government, the private sector and civil society to use money for building toilets more effectively.
“It became very clear to us that the private sector has a big role to play in helping us to remove this national blemish once and for all. So, we have committed our department to do everything we can in conjunction with the Department of Basic Education to declare war on pit toilets once and for all and to remove them from our landscape.”
VIDEO | Deda Primary School bathrooms upgraded after learners were subjected to using pit toilets in KZN:
