- Public health officers go through 40 to 45 households in a village to check whether each has a toilet and a hand-washing facility next to the toilet.
- Once this is verified, they then declare the village to be OD free.
Migori is inching closer to being declared an open defaecation free county.
This means the county will become the fourth in the country to be certified as ODF. The other three are Kitui, Busia and Siaya.
“Migori was supposed to get certified earlier however, when the pandemic happened in March 2020, people were not able to go to the ground and certify for sure that the entire village is open defaecation free so it is still waiting to be certified,” WASH officer at Unicef Kenya Jimmy Kariuki said.
“There are activities around certifying villages. This is one of the strategies in community-led total sanitation,” Kariuki added.
Homa Bay and Ragwe subcounties in Homa Bay county are also almost about to attain free open defaecation status.
With government renewed effort to end open defaecation in the country by 2025, officials have been undertaking a series of activities to ensure more counties eliminate the OD challenge and get certified.
Busia received the status in 2012 before county governments were fully established while Siaya was the first to acquire open defaecation free status after the full establishment of county governments in Kenya. Kitui attained the status in 2018.
Busia was declared open defaecation free by the Health Ministry courtesy of a project dubbed Financial Inclusion in Improved sanitation in Kenya implemented by African Medical and Research Foundation.
All the Siaya subcounties of Ugunja, Alego Usonga, Ugenya, Rarieda, Gem and Bondo were declared Open Defaecation Free in that order between May 2017 and April 2018.
Low latrine coverage and widespread open defaecation have been responsible for persistent cholera outbreaks in several counties.
According to Kariuki, public health officers go through 40 to 45 households in a village to check whether each has a toilet and a hand-washing facility next to the toilet.
Once this is verified, they then declare the village to be OD free which means everyone is using a toilet and nobody is using the bush.
Kariuki noted that a good toilet should be accessible to the family, offer privacy to both genders, especially to women and girls, should have clean floors, be free from flies and should have a hand-washing station for users.
“The ministry is using community-led total sanitation which basically is an approach of triggering communities to act, and once they act they are able to construct toilets for themselves and more importantly use these toilets that they have constructed,” he said.
“Once you take ownership and you construct a toilet effectively your behaviours change in the sense that you will want to use it as well,” he added.
Fifteen counties, mostly from Northern region and Nyanza have been mapped out to be having the highest number of households that lack toilets and still practising defaecation in the open or in the bushes.
The 15 high open defaecation burden counties include Baringo, Garissa, Homa Bay, Isiolo, Kajiado, Kilifi, Kwale, Mandera, Marsabit, Narok, Samburu, Tana River, Turkana, Wajir and West Pokot.
In renewed government effort to ensure the burden of open defaecation in these counties is eased, the Ministry of Health and partners have formed the Kenya Sanitation Alliance, a sanitation movement focusing on the 15 counties.
Health Ministry WASH Division deputy head Jane Mule said the alliance which will be launched in September, brings together governors from the 15 counties, their CECs for health and water, the private sector with the national government being the alliance chair.
“The alliance is to drum up support for allocation of resources for sanitation and hygiene in these counties and also to set up a monitoring and evaluation system and review meetings which will be happening on a quarterly basis to review progress,” Mule said.
-Edited by SKanyara