By Freddie Clayton and Sonja Smith

Author Bios:

Freddie Clayton is an investigative journalist with the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism, focusing on environmental themes, specifically water and sanitation issues worldwide. He is a contributor to the Observatory.

Sonja Smith is an award-winning journalist based in Namibia and a correspondent for the Associated Press. She has worked for various Namibian media publications, including Confidente, Windhoek Observer, and the Namibian. Her last Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism investigation, on the working conditions of Namibia’s grape farmers, was recognized at the 2021 Editor’s Forum of Namibia Journalism Awards as the winner of the Best Agriculture and Environmental story. She is a contributor to the Observatory.

Credit Line: The Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism produced an earlier version of this article. This adaptation was produced for the Observatory by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

IMAGE CREDIT: Margaret Courtney-Clarke

From the outskirts of cities to the most rural parts of the country, more than 1 million Namibians lack adequate access to toilets, and they are often faced with only one option: open defecation.

According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF’s Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) 2020 data, Namibia ranked sixth for the highest rate of open defecation in the world at 47 percent. Less than half of the country’s 2.5 million citizens use facilities that safely separate waste from human contact, while some 5 percent use inadequate facilities such as open pits, buckets, and hanging latrines.

The nation’s severely low sanitation levels stand in stark contrast to the rest of southern Africa, a region where Namibia ranks the worst for sanitation coverage. Its rates of open defecation are more than double Angola’s to the north and almost five times higher than those of neighboring Botswana and Zambia.

The consequences extend far beyond foul odor. The sheer amount of human feces deposited in and around Namibian homes makes avoiding contact and even ingestion of it almost impossible. Excrement litters the ground between shacks where children play, and flies travel freely from waste to fluids and food. As feces seep into the environment, crops and vital water sources used for drinking, cooking, and fishing are contaminated.

These conditions put Namibians, especially children, at risk of deadly fecal-oral diseases and infections that cause diarrhea, the second-biggest killer of under-fives in the country, according to a 2020 article in the African Journal of Primary Health and Family Medicine. At the same time, sanitation-related deficiencies such as malnutrition and stunted growth are also prevalent in the country.

“If we don’t change our trajectory, things are definitely going to get worse, especially in the informal settlements and in the rural areas,” said Matheus Shuuya, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) specialist at UNICEF Namibia. “We will experience more children getting sick… I’m sure we will also experience frequent outbreaks of other diseases.”

Education, dignity, and safety are in jeopardy, too. The inability of girls to manage their menstrual health on school premises that lack adequate sanitation leads to increased absenteeism. Namibians also risk rape, robberies, and even wildlife attacks as they are forced to seek the privacy of the bush.

Open defecation levels are even higher in rural areas, exceeding 70 percent. According to 2020 data, almost half of Namibians live in sparsely populated villages that dot the horizon. Residents with water supply struggle to keep that water clean, and those without access to water often turn to the river and groundwater supplies contaminated with excrement. Even clinics and schools lack adequate sanitation.

Namibia is also one of many African countries struggling with the harshest impacts of climate change, but here, the issue amplifies the lack of adequate sanitation in and around cities. Simon Dirkse, head of climate at Windhoek’s Meteorological Institute in 2022, was pessimistic in his assessment of Namibia’s future and the impact of more extreme weather events. “Yes, climate change is forcing migration,” he said, adding, “Our poverty levels and these extreme events don’t go together. How can someone survive a heatwave in the informal settlements? Even heavy rain is too much for them.”

IMAGE CREDIT: Margaret Courtney-Clarke

Namibia on Course to Miss Sanitation Targets

Namibia has ratified the core international human rights treaties that protect the right to sanitation. At the same time, its constitution calls for “consistent planning to raise and maintain an acceptable level of nutrition and standard of living of the Namibian people and to improve public health.”

Namibia’s 2008 Water Supply and Sanitation Policy outlines that “essential water supply and sanitation services should become available to all Namibians, and should be acceptable and accessible at a cost which is affordable to the country as a whole.” The South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) Party, which has governed the country since independence in 1990, has also committed Namibia to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Six (SDG6), which ensures that all its citizens have access to clean water and sanitation by 2030.

However, according to JMP data analyzed by the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) in 2022, stagnant sanitation levels over the past decade mean Namibia is not on course to hit these targets—not even close. While more than 1 million Namibians wait for this basic human right to be granted, the government appears to be taking too few steps to address a crisis that may worsen due to climate change and rapid urbanization.

Despite pouring billions of Namibian dollars into sanitation, the country’s Fifth National Development Plan for the period between 2017 and 2022 stated that the sanitation sector has suffered from “poor coordination, lack of accountability, and spreading efforts and resources too thinly.” Late former President Hage Geingob’s administration vowed to improve sanitation access and invest in educating Namibians on the value of good hygiene. However, the country’s sanitation regime is still sorely lacking.

Dr. Kalumbi Shangula, Namibia’s minister for health and social services, recognizes Namibians’ struggles. He told CCIJ that poor sanitation was overburdening health services and keeping Namibians out of work, but he remained optimistic that conditions would improve. “[G]radually [sanitation] will catch up… As long as there is goodwill and people are talking about strategies, there is hope,” he said during an interview in November 2022.

In March 2023, Namibian Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said the government had “identified the need to improve universal access to sanitation and hygiene in informal urban settlements and rural communities.”

Indeed, proper sanitation keeps water and food free from contamination, children in school, and people healthy and safe from danger. However, attempts to provide adequate sanitation have yet to yield significant results in Namibia.

The influx of migrants has stretched Namibia’s capital Windhoek’s limits and worsened sanitation. Informal settlements have expanded uncontrollably as people arrive faster than the capital can provide services. Newcomers build shacks in tiny pockets of space without any regulation, arrangement, or design.

“Everybody over the years has just been centralizing into Windhoek,” said Archie Benjamin, SWAPO member and CEO for the municipality of Swakopmund. “The intention of the government at independence was to develop the rural areas to such an extent that people don’t feel the need to relocate, but that has not really worked out.”

Government Failure on Sanitation

Even at the highest levels of government, a lack of familiarity with the data is not uncommon. In Namibia’s preparatory meeting notes for the United Nations 2023 Water Conference, the government claimed 46 percent of rural communities have access to “safely managed sanitation” within 2.5 kilometers. However, Namibia’s census mapping report, published the same year and seen by CCIJ, states that less than 27 percent of Namibians in rural areas have such access. Calle Schlettwein, Namibia’s minister for water, agriculture, and land reform (MAWLR), declined to comment on this discrepancy.

In 2012, the UN’s special rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque, said Namibia’s sanitation deficit was not a result of a lack of finances but a “lack of a common vision,” “prioritization” and an “absence of effective coordination among the different ministries and between central and local governments.” In a 2011 press statement, she also warned that the benefits of investing in sanitation would be lost if the government failed to give equal attention to “hygiene promotion and awareness raising on the benefits of safe sanitation.”

In the run-up to the 2019 elections, Geingob had declared living conditions in informal settlements a “humanitarian crisis” and promised to rid cities of shacks before 2024. But this hasn’t happened. In Windhoek, the number of shacks is increasing by 10 percent each year, according to Sade Gawanas, the city’s former mayor and Landless People’s Movement Party member.

Namibia’s urban and rural development minister, Erastus Uutoni, declined to comment on the government’s failure to slow the growth of informal settlements, but in February 2023, he said Namibia faced serious sanitation problems if urbanization was left unchecked. He called on local authorities to direct budgeting toward sanitation infrastructure and upgrading the informal settlements.

Ministers, politicians, and councilors across the political spectrum have called for greater investment in improving sanitation in rural areas. Yet, according to CCIJ’s analysis, Namibia’s rural development and coordination budget dropped 33 percent between 2019 and 2022.

Urbanization is creating conditions that lead to more deaths and diseases as settlements expand. Meanwhile, climate change is exacerbating the problem as persistent drought conditions since 2022 have left many in rural Namibia—who depend on crops and livestock—jobless.

Namibia’s informal settlements are among the hardest hit by poor sanitation. According to the international charity World Habitat, 40 percent of Namibians live in informal settlements. The umbrella organization that supports environmental nonprofits, the Namibian Chamber of Environment (NCE), stated that more than half of these settlements lack access to toilets based on a 2020 review. The NCE also estimated that at least 45 tons of human feces are deposited daily through open defecation in Windhoek’s informal settlements.

For example, Havana is one of the largest informal settlements, with more than 50,000 shacks squeezed up against one another. Men, women, and children find pockets of dirt to relieve themselves on their way back from church, school, or the market. Tissues, sanitary pads, and excrement litter the ground. Several government toilets in Havana are in disrepair, with doors hanging off their hinges and latrines clogged to the brim. For those who have access to these toilets, many choose open defecation as the lesser of two evils.

“There’s no structure, no planning, and you cannot put in water pipes,” said Sebastian Husselmann, Windhoek’s chief engineer for bulk and wastewater. “How do you put a sewage network in an unplanned area?”

Conditions here are perfect for the spread of disease, as overcrowding leads to the cross-contamination of feces, water, and food. “[In some cases, there] are 19, 20, 35 in one house. One toilet for 35 people—it’s not healthy or hygienic,” said Rodman Katjaimo, the constituency councilor for Katatura Central in Windhoek. The informal settlements are where hepatitis E hit hardest, accounting for 62 percent of confirmed and suspected cases during Namibia’s outbreak, which started in 2017 and lasted until 2022.

Simply put, building toilets would not guarantee their use. People must want to use them, but to create that incentive, many Namibians, who have lacked adequate sanitation for decades, would need to be educated on the benefits and instructed on proper cleaning, maintenance, and hygiene.

The government acknowledges this. Its 2008 Water Supply and Sanitation Policy outlined that improving sanitation would be achieved through “community involvement and participation.” Yet, it appears that it has not followed its own guidance.

In 2014, many beneficiaries of a scheme that aimed to build 6,500 pit latrines across the country returned to the bush to defecate. Residents of the Coblenz and Okondjatu villages in central Namibia complained about the stench, lamenting their inability to keep the toilets in good condition. “We only have a few of these dry pit toilets, and as much as they are helpful, we are challenged when it comes to their maintenance,” a villager named Unjee Usora told the Namibian. “At the end of the day, the toilet is filled with feces.”

In 2009, with input from four ministries, local authorities, and the prime minister’s office, the government outlined plans to stimulate “behavioral change” with a national hygiene campaign. This was supposed to happen by 2015, yet as of early 2024, Namibia still did not have a nationwide campaign to promote sanitation and hygiene.

The latest draft of Namibia’s 2022-2027 National Sanitation and Hygiene Strategy, reviewed by CCIJ, accepts that “[u]ser involvement in the choice of sanitation systems and their construction, operation, and maintenance [was] limited… [leading] to sanitation facilities not being used, operated or maintained properly.”

Whether toilets are flush or dry, providing sanitation is more than just an infrastructure project, and the government is aware of this, too. It was the duty of the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform (MAWLR) to organize “the training of communities on operation and maintenance,” according to the government’s 2010-2015 National Sanitation Strategy.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MoHSS) was responsible for conducting “hygiene education in rural areas and informal settlements.” In October 2023, the Namibian government began implementing sanitation reform, announcing new toilet-building projects across seven regions, as CCIJ reported in December 2023. But this has been on a small scale, with toilets only being built in four rural villages since October 2023.

In fact, according to Namibia’s 2022-2027 National Sanitation and Hygiene Strategy, MAWLR and the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development (MURD) alone built 20,230 sanitation facilities between 2009 and 2019, yet “no community involvement and participation or sanitation hygiene promotion activities were incorporated.” During those 10 years, open defecation dropped by just 2.7 percent nationwide, while sanitation levels in urban areas declined.

CCIJ asked Dr. Elijah Ngurare, MAWLR’s water affairs department’s deputy executive director, why Namibia failed to engage communities in training and operation or run a national campaign promoting hygiene. He said, “Sanitation challenges have been acknowledged, and the government has now decided to scale up the process. Construction, maintenance, and rehabilitation [are] going to be the norm. This includes both urban and rural sanitation.”

Lack of Coordination

At a time when sanitation desperately needs a dedicated, coordinated, and potentially more costly approach, those in the private sector say the government has complicated their efforts to provide more sustainable options.

Rather than centralizing responsibility for improving sanitation, seven ministries, regional councils, and local authorities have each been tasked with its delivery: MAWLR, MURD, the Ministry of Health and Social Services, the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Culture, the Ministry of Environment Forest and Tourism, and the Ministry of Gender Equality, Poverty Eradication, and Social Welfare each have funding for sanitation in their budgets.

Meanwhile, local authorities—partly funded by the central government—are responsible for providing sanitation in urban areas, including informal settlements, and the Ministry of Work and Transport (MWT) is responsible for developing new and managing existing wet sanitation systems.

This division of duties and funding makes monitoring and tracking investment in sanitation and Namibia’s adherence to the 2015 Ngor declaration especially difficult. Under this declaration, the government promised to commit a minimum of 0.5 percent of its GDP to sanitation and hygiene annually from 2020 onward.

Namibia’s 2022-2027 Sanitation and Hygiene Strategy acknowledges that the government and local authorities “do not have a clear budget line for sanitation… As a result, the sanitation budget is… difficult to track.”

Shuuya of UNICEF Namibia said this budgetary failure contributed to poor coordination of the sanitation sector, something the government admitted in its Fifth National Development Plan. “The sector is… not playing together,” he explained, adding he was desperate to see the Namibian government develop a separate sanitation budget so that it could monitor funding moving forward.

The consequences of insufficient governance are evident in surveying the Namibian landscape. Damaged, disused, and derelict government toilets can be found across the country. Often, they are filthy beyond use, blocked by newspapers, or filled with excrement, and many no longer function.

Officials in MAWLR, charged with coordinating government sanitation services, admitted in 2022 via email to CCIJ that challenges in improving sanitation included “poor sanitation practices and the non-involvement of communities,” but also said that limited access to water, resources, and finance still remained a hindrance.

However, vast sums of money have been allocated to the ministries responsible for sanitation. Whether those funds are actually spent on sanitation is a matter of priority, and in 2022, MAWLR cut its water supply and sanitation coordination budget by 72.7 percent.

Ngurare admitted that “most funding earmarked for water and sanitation in the last couple of years had unfortunately been redirected to the Neckartal Dam,” Namibia’s largest dam that supports a large irrigation scheme in the south.

Shangula, the health minister, also blamed a lack of funds, arguing that low tax revenues prevented Namibia from prioritizing sanitation. “You can only [improve sanitation] if you have money, and we don’t have enough for it,” he said. “The economic base of Namibia is very small.”

But again, it may just be an issue of prioritization. According to UNICEF, the lion’s share of Namibia’s health budget allocation is spent on curative rather than preventative services, with little left for projects that could promote sanitation and hygiene.

While Namibia may have a narrow tax base, according to the World Bank, it generates more tax revenue per capita than Botswana, Lesotho, and almost as much as Zambia, three southern African countries with better sanitation coverage than Namibia.

The Toilet Target

Between 2011 and 2013, the government constructed 10,000 dry Ecosan toilets across five northern regions at a cost of N$181.5 million ($22.4 million). Still, many are no longer usable because residents say they were not provided with instruction, promotion, cleaning, or maintenance guidance upon installation.

Eline van der Linden is the executive director of Omuramba Impact Investing, the sole distributor of a dry toilet called the Enviro Loo. Unlike the ventilated pit latrines preferred by the government, her toilets reduce odor by separating waste from urine and are built with a closed container that prevents groundwater pollution. Crucially, she also offers user and maintenance training upon installation—including refresher courses on cleaning and maintenance with locals who can then charge the community a fee for their services as cleaners or janitors.

However, the technology and training come at a higher price tag, which is why van der Linden no longer bids on government tenders. Her cost, she said, exceeds government specifications.

Van der Linden said she has encountered the same stubborn obsession with flush toilets and markets her toilets as a sustainable “in the meantime solution” for people who will one day, ideally, have access to flush toilets. Her Enviro Loos are not the cheapest on the market, but she thinks that instead of investing larger amounts in the best dry toilets, the government would rather wait to score points with flush toilets. “They do not see any benefits in dry sanitation,” she added.

Shuuya said there’s some truth in this. Under the apartheid regime, which preceded Namibia’s independence, “flush toilets were the preserve of the colonizers, the white people,” he explained. “Blacks were provided with pit toilets and bucket toilets.”

Shangula declined to comment on the historical connection, but Shuuya argued that this helps explain why many Black Namibians still perceive even quality dry toilets as inferior.

“But then there are practicalities,” Shuuya noted. “You can only have a flush toilet when you have water.”

Windhoek rural constituency councilor and member of the opposition party, the Popular Democratic Movement, Petrus Adams, has flush toilets in his town, Groot Aub, but residents don’t always have enough water to use them. “[But] open defecation,” he said, “what does it cost?”

In a country where almost a quarter of citizens face high levels of acute food insecurity, many can scarcely afford the 16,000 liters of extra water it costs to flush a toilet per person each year.

“[The government] thinks cheap solutions will last,” said van der Linden, who has never seen training included as part of a tender. “When they do put dry toilets down, they do it without any additional effort… No toilet system will work without educating communities on daily cleaning.”

By the government’s own admission, sanitation efforts have stalled in recent years, and the various ministries tasked with improving sanitation have each failed to prioritize the sector.

MURD, for example, has failed to hit its toilet targets in four of the five years leading up to 2022. In 2021, the ministry promised to construct 10,000 new toilets in rural areas but built only 980 before claiming the original target was “erroneously indicated” and that 1,000 was the real target. In explaining the failure to meet even the 1,000 toilets target, MURD said, “late submission of activity plans and accountability reports from the regions result[ed] in late approval of budgets.”

The sanitation sector has also failed to communicate its strategy to parliament members. A draft of Namibia’s 2022-2027 National Sanitation and Hygiene Strategy acknowledged that one of the biggest obstacles was that politicians and local authorities continued to promise flush facilities even as ministries agreed to promote dry sanitation in urban and rural areas.

Shangula denied that other countries in the region were performing better than Namibia—with lower defecation rates and better access to sanitation—despite being presented with data that ran counter to his claim. “Botswana has a similar setup [as] Namibia… they are struggling with the same issues we are,” he said. “I don’t think that comparison is correct.”

However, even though Botswana faces challenges such as inadequate informal settlements, thinly populated rural regions, water scarcity, and an arid climate, statistics from the World Health Organization and UNICEF’s Joint Monitoring Program reveal that four out of five people in Botswana have access to basic sanitation, a figure exceeding Namibia’s by more than twice.

Addressing the Problem

However, Namibia still has a chance to embrace more aggressive investment and focus on improving sanitation by raising awareness and working with communities.

Without government-backed sanitation services and information campaigns, NGO-backed schemes have helped transform informal settlements and rural communities by creating demand for sanitation and motivating residents to invest in solutions. A proper approach is not as cheap and easy as simply building toilets, but it has proven effective. In 2010, the German development agency Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) supported the Omaruru Basin Management Committee (OmBMC) in central Namibia by providing 140 residents of an informal settlement with 21 dry Otji toilets, designed by Namibian NGO Clay House Project (CHP).

CHP staff built the toilets while training local laborers to do so, too. They nurtured a sense of ownership as beneficiaries made a small financial contribution and assisted in painting and digging. Each toilet was equipped with instructions and handwashing facilities, and CHP also conducted an awareness-raising campaign to promote the use of toilets, which remained in use and seemed to be still well maintained more than 18 months after their introduction in 2012. The OmBMC said there was even demand for 100 more.

However, more toilets required additional funding or subsidies from the Omaruru Municipality via MAWLR. The local authorities also considered them inferior to “high-class” flush toilets despite the extra maintenance, construction, and operational costs of flush toilets. A 2012 CHP report on the Otji toilets concluded that “[w]ithout the support of decision-makers, it will not be possible to establish a dry sanitation system on a large scale.”

“Wet sanitation risks making unaffordable water even more unaffordable,” said de Albuquerque, the UN’s former special rapporteur, in a press statement in 2011. She urged Namibia to promote dry toilets, warning that if people continue to perceive them as inferior, they will never embrace them. However, she advised that no one size fits all and that “communities and households must have choices about which sanitation technology suits their needs best.”

Some schemes are tailor-made to embrace this philosophy. Ndahambelela Indongo, 39, lives in Max-Mutongolume, a community inside Havana’s informal settlement. She used to walk for an hour in the hills to find a safe space to defecate, but after learning about the adverse health effects, she built her own toilet and tippy tap—a hygienic hand-washing mechanism that uses running water.

Indongo got her information from a sanitation center run by Development Workshop Namibia (DW), an NGO that has helped communities nationwide become open defecation-free (ODF). ODF status is granted when a community shows an ongoing adoption of good hygiene practices and all its members have access to sanitation facilities, with at least 80 percent of residents using them.

DW uses community-led total sanitation (CLTS), a collaborative, bottom-up approach to achieve and sustain ODF-free status by focusing on “igniting a change in sanitation behavior through community participation rather than constructing toilets,” according to Plan International. Facilitators trained in CLTS help community members understand the consequences of open defecation, which they hope will lead to mobilization, create demand for sanitation, and assist the community in deciding what action to take.

Since its inception in 2016, Sheya Timo Gotlieb says DW has built 66 sanitation centers in public spaces, each including a demonstration toilet to encourage residents to build their own. To date, it claims it has trained 323 local bricklayers in toilet construction, who can then offer their services to assist residents. (CCIJ has not been able to verify those figures independently.)

In the absence of government-backed sanitation services and information campaigns, schemes like these have helped transform informal settlements and rural communities by creating a demand for sanitation and motivating residents to invest in solutions. However, as of 2024, only 16 areas in Namibia are currently ODF.

Though the government has now integrated CLTS into its approach to improving sanitation, projects are not yet happening on a large enough scale to stem the crisis.

However, while these schemes may be costly, so is the price of poor sanitation. Shangula told CCIJ that inadequate access to sanitation leads to sickness and infection, while the risk of disease and pollution continues to threaten tourism and agricultural industries.

“There’s a need to establish what the cost of inaction is,” added Shuuya. “Perhaps the decision-makers don’t have the evidence to say, ‘This is what we’re losing out on by not investing in sanitation.’”

Organizations like DW and UNICEF cannot facilitate nationwide change alone, and Shuuya is also realistic about what Namibia can accomplish without government support. “We are not going to be able to achieve the SDG6 [the UN Sustainable Development] goal unless something drastic happens,” he said. “We need a national campaign with proper government leadership to promote the importance of sanitation. That would really make a change.”

SWAPO’s 2021 Harambee Prosperity Plan II allocated N$120 million ($8 million) to officially launch CLTS in Namibia and “increase WASH awareness through the community construction of latrines.” The government has also trained staff from four ministries on CLTS, while Namibia’s 2022-2027 National Sanitation and Hygiene Strategy combines “awareness development” and “changing social norms” with providing infrastructure.

In 2021, the government also launched the Namibia Water Sector Support Program (NWSSP), one of the nation’s most significant infrastructure projects to improve sanitation for 1 million Namibians. In 2020, the project was funded by a $121.7 million loan from the African Development Bank. Targets include reducing open defecation in rural areas by 55 percent by 2025 and ensuring access to improved sanitation services for all Namibians by 2030.

When Calle Schlettwein, Namibia’s minister for agriculture, water, and land reform, launched the project in August 2021, he urged service providers, contractors, and consultants not to cut corners. He appealed for “accountability, transparency, and a corruption-free atmosphere to prevail.”

This sounds good on paper, but as of 2024, the scheme’s major projects are still in the design and procurement phase. Schlettwein’s office admitted that the NWSSP had “a slow start” and that “much more funding” would be required to meet SDG6.

Views From the Ground

While the government works to improve access, many Namibians remain discouraged by previous attempts to provide their villages with sanitation.

Paulus Mutikisha, the headman for Ekolanaambo, a village in northern Namibia’s Oshana region and one of the beneficiaries of government toilets in 2012, told the Namibian Sun in 2019, “We have never used… [the toilets] because we were never trained on how to use them,” adding that some facilities were not installed properly. “Money has been wasted, and the structures are… falling apart,” he said.

Xhuka Shorty was given a dry toilet—a type of toilet that uses no water or chemicals to move waste. Instead, excrement drops into a tank or bag that must be emptied and cleaned. Dry toilets’ lifetime costs are lower than flush toilets, as they save on water, and some even produce fertilizer from the dried waste. In southern Africa’s driest country,where sewage connections reach just 35 percent of citizens, they are vital to ensuring sanitation.

But dry toilets do require more work. There’s no water seal to protect from the smell, so things can get ugly quickly without daily cleaning and good ventilation. Every so often, the tank must be emptied. If the toilet is a pit latrine, then one must dig another hole and move the pot before its subsequent use. There are also things you can’t always put down the hole—such as water—and, like all toilets, sometimes they need fixing.

None of this is obvious, especially if you’ve never used one.

Shorty and his family are San, an Indigenous group of people in southern Africa. Eight years ago, he and 16 members of his family were evicted from the farmland where they had lived and worked as laborers for generations.

Left to survive on Shorty’s monthly pension of N$1,300 ($87) in 2019, they migrated to Katumba village in northwest Namibia, where they lived under the shade of a tree. One day, the government installed a toilet next to Shorty’s tree. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked.

In 2012, Letisia Nghiondjwa, 44, moved to Havana with her husband from Okanguati village in northern Namibia “for a better life.” She makes a living selling fatcakes—fried dough coated in sugar—and oshikundu, a traditional Namibian brew. But she and her husband are two of many who have been squeezed into dangerously squalid conditions.

“We live by the dumpsite, and when it rains, you cannot sleep [because of] the smell,” she said. “It’s been 10 years now, and nothing much has been done by the government to make our lives easier… We sleep in sewage.”

Mukennah Scholastika is the headmistress of a public primary school in rural Kavango East in northern Namibia, where students gather under the heat of classrooms built from corrugated iron. “We have 330 students,” she told CCIJ in November 2022 “Until last month, we had no toilets, and they had to use the bush.”

“Students come late for class and are exposed to dangers in the bush, like insects and snakes. Some go home and don’t come back again. Sometimes, they even defecate in their clothes. Girls will miss school, especially when they are on their period,” Scholastika added.

She asked the parents to contribute toward constructing two toilets for the students and one for the staff, each built by the community and maintained by the teachers. Long queues form before class starts in the morning. “We have one for the boys and one for the girls,” Scholastika noted.

Avoiding cross-contamination or contact with excrement is difficult, but maintaining cleanliness is a challenge even health professionals face in rural areas. Nurse Sem Tetera, 23, helped deliver a baby by the side of a road in Kavango West, Namibia’s poorest region with the worst sanitation coverage. The new mother was rushed to his clinic, a small building with no toilets that only had water when the village chief could afford it.

“It’s a struggle working here,” said Tetera. “Most of the time, we have no water, and it is a huge problem for us to work without it.”

Johannes Nghidinwa, 53, sits on the deck in front of his shack with his wife, who cradles their five-month-old baby. Their home rests in the shadows of a landfill site that has become one of many open-air communal toilets in Havana. “We are a community of thousands of people, but the toilets here are very few; you can count them on your hands,” he said. “Not a week passes by without any of us getting sick with diarrhea, fever, and flu.”

For many others, especially women, the risks of using the bush at night are far too high, and they must defecate inside their own homes instead. Janet Gaes, 34, lives with her four children in Windhoek’s Otjomuise 8ste Laan informal settlement. Her shack sits on a hill overlooking a dry riverbed overflowing with toilet paper. During the day, she takes her children to the riverbed, but they share a bucket at home at night.

“We do not go to the riverbed when it’s dark,” she said, washing her one-year-old on the path outside. “People get assaulted there, so at night, we use the bucket to relieve ourselves. Then we throw the feces out in the morning and wash [the bucket] again to use the following night.”

Hilma Hamalwa, 35, lives a 30-minute walk from Shaanika in the Democratic Resettlement Community (DRC), one of Namibia’s largest informal settlements. When she realized that her neighbors were suffering from the same infections and illnesses after using the bush to defecate, she dug a hole in the ground for them and added four slabs of corrugated iron for a bit of privacy.

“This is not the kind of life a human being should live,” she said.

Reinard Enrich, 18, was attacked at night while defecating on a landfill in Havana. “The absence of toilets has made our situation unsafe,” he said. “I was minding my own business, playing music on my phone. Two men approached me—one grabbed me by my throat, and another grabbed my phone. I couldn’t do anything, so [now] I do not go out when it’s dark anymore.”

Daily, Natalia Shaanika, 15, escorts her five younger siblings across a busy road to a landfill site to relieve themselves. As they squat—partially hidden by scraps of corrugated iron and used toilet paper—their older sister keeps watch.

When a car comes their way, Shaanika hurries them back half-naked toward their shack. Flies usually swarm over a bucket of water, which they use to wash their hands.

“We are a family of eight in a shack in a community that has no water points or toilets,” said Shaanika, who resides in Swakopmund’s DRC. Some 20,000 people live without running water or sewage in the DRC.

“Together with our parents, we relieve ourselves in the dump behind our home. When I’m on my period, it’s the same place I [use as a] toilet and where I throw the used pads,” she added.

These conditions mean Shaanika and her siblings suffer from frequent infections and bouts of diarrhea, along with the thousands of other men, women, and children who use the same and other similar strips of wasteland as toilets in the DRC.

The Future

Lukas Shilongo, 21, who lives in the crowded settlement of Havana, is skeptical about government help. “They make campaign [promises] lie to us, and then they forget,” he said. They promise us water, electricity, and toilets. [They don’t] come.”

Gawanas, the former Windhoek mayor, agreed that leaders used sanitation as a campaign tactic during elections and later broke their promises. “I don’t think [politicians] want to solve the problem,” she said. “They want to keep people begging for more because it is their tool to stay in power.”

Geingob was reelected as president for a second term in 2019. However, that election saw SWAPO’s vote percentage drop significantly from 87 percent in 2014 to 56 percent—it’s the most significant loss of support in the nation’s history as drought, recession, and a massive corruption scandal weighed on voters.

Namibians may be tired of begging for their human rights. As SWAPO’s electoral dominance fades, politicians of all parties and at every level could be forced to keep their promises on sanitation services or risk being held accountable at the polls.

Alfons Kaundu, a Mbunza traditional authority chief in rural Namibia, thinks that’s possible. “People are suffering here,” he said. “The government is not respecting people’s rights.”

Namibian Government Takes Action

The Namibian government has initiated crucial sanitation reforms following an in-depth investigation by CCIJ that exposed a nation in turmoil.

Addressing CCIJ directly on November 19, 2023, Dr. Elijah Ngurare from MAWLR, revealed that extensive toilet construction projects are underway in seven regions as part of the Namibia Water Sector Support Program—marking one of the largest infrastructure endeavors in the nation’s history.

Significantly, these toilet construction projects are now accompanied by essential engagement efforts to educate communities on the proper use and maintenance of the facilities and promote other hygiene practices recommended in the CCIJ report.