Turkana County Public Health Officers and Partners have committed to increase efforts aimed at ending open defecation.
In a milestone achievement, Kasogol Etom, a village located in Naipelilim, Loima, is the latest to be declared open defecation free (ODF).
Kasogol Etom's achievement brings the number of villages in the county that have achieved this status to 934 out of 2,249 villages.
The village has 44 households and all have been certified as practicing good hygiene and sanitation, making it the latest village in the county to achieve ODF status.
The County Public Health Directorate is spearheading efforts to make the entire county ODF.
Deputy Director of Public Health and Sanitation, Daniel Esimit, pointed out that the village was fully WASH (Water, Sanitation and hygiene) compliant. A dispensary, school and community have access to clean drinking water.
“The villagers can attest that diarrhoea cases have reduced when they began building and using the latrines,” he said.
Esimit said women now have the opportunity to engage in economic activities instead of spending most of their time looking for water.
The community-led total sanitation strategy, funded by KOICA Kenya Office through UNICEF Kenya with WHH Kenya (Welthungerhilfe), assists communities realise the effects of poor sanitation and then ignite social behaviour change to start using latrines and employ good hygiene practices.
Partners involved in the project including Director General - East Africa KOICA, Hyewon Cho and UNICEF chief of WASH section, Mahboob Ahmed Bajwa, congratulated the villagers on their achievement and emphasised the importance of using latrines, including young children.
Esther Atabo, a resident of the Kasogol Etom village, described a time they had no latrines as the worst of times.
“We have been experiencing cholera outbreak, diarrhoea and cases of typhoid in our region but since we have embraced the hygiene, the cases are minimal in the community,” she said.
Atabo, a mother of four, said last year she constructed a grass-thatched latrine behind her house.
She said before having a latrine, she would regularly take her children to the clinic three to four times a month because of diarrhoea and cholera outbreaks.
Pastoral lifestyle, soil structure and socio-cultural traditions have also been blamed for the poor latrine use among communities in Turkana.
According to Turkana customs, it's an abomination for a daughter in-law to share a latrine with her father-in-law forcing either party to use the bush to relieve themselves.
The 2019 census showed that only 26 per cent of Turkana's entire population of 926,976 had access to latrines as a huge population prefers open defecation.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) notes that over 3.6 billion people across the globe lack latrines and continue to live without access to safely managed sanitation.
