School latrines are an underappreciated necessity. Without them, school children have to go in the fields, or, wherever they can find. E.coli is everywhere. As often as not, the health department will close down the school if its latrines are not working.
TGUP has completed dozens of latrines in 10 developing world countries. They include 2-, 4-, 5-, and 6-stall configurations. They’ve gone into schools with as few as 180 and as many as 1,100 students. There is a studied science to doing latrines well.
It was the Babylonians who invented latrines. They had stopped being hunter-gatherers and settled down in one place. But poop quickly accumulated. Their solution still works, today: a reinforced hole in the ground with a simple structure on top.
The size of the hole needed depends on a few simple variables: how many students will be using it; average daily excrement (a function of local calorie count); how long you intend it to last; and the porosity of the soil where it is built.
Labor accounts for about 63% of the cost of an average latrine. You can see why.
Here is how the average costs break down based on experience with more than 80 stalls:
In other words, it costs an average of 64 cents to give one student a latrine stall for one year. It costs about $2.25 to give a student a desk seat for a year. Remember, the school doesn’t work without either. In other words, latrines are one of the highest returns on education investment in the world, because without them, nothing else works.
One more thing: The student-to-stall ratio is important. When it gets above 30:1, the school starts to get impacted because the students can’t get in and out fast enough. Some of our situations are working at over 140:1.
Every country has its own design standards, based on materials, soil conditions, and customary practices. All TGUP-built latrines are engineered to local civil engineering codes to meet education and health department standards.
Don’t YOU prefer to have a clean, private place to go? So do children. Functioning latrines provide not only safe public health, but dignity to the children. They can’t name the dignity, but they know it. Just as you do.
Thank you for your interest and support. The schools literally don’t work without latrines. We would rather do them well than not.
TGUP
