School toilets inadequate

Published: 10/02/2009 05:00

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LookAtVietnam – Ngo Doan Huan is very proud of the school he is managing in the remote northern province of Lai Chau’s Tam Duong District, but the toilet is another story.

Students at Sín Cheng Primary School in Si Ma Cai District in the northern province of Lao Cai wash their hands. Rural school sanitation need to be improved.

More than 150 students in his two-storey school campus in Bo Village have to share a narrow double-tank latrine in which the dung is kept for fertiliser, 200m from classrooms and the river.

“The toilets are not enough for all students so many of them have to defecate and urinate outdoors,” principal Huan said.

It’s the same situation for 300 students in other campuses of Ban Bo Primary School as well as thousands of students in Lai Chau and other mountainous provinces.

The vice chairwoman of the National Assembly Committee for Culture, Education, Youth and Children’s Affairs, Ngo Thi Minh, said the situation was not good enough. Schools had upgraded classrooms and other infrastructure but hadn’t upgraded toilets, she said.

Many schools actually didn’t have toilets so students had to use toilets in local people’s houses.

“That’s one reason many girl students quit schools,” she said.

Her comments were supported by a Red Cross survey at 187 primary schools in four provinces in central Nghe An, Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, and two in the north named Dien Bien and Lai Chau that showed 88 per cent of the schools needed help to build clean water tanks and toilets.

Red Cross worker Nguyen Trung Nghia said toilets had been overlooked when building schools, causing a contrast between modern concrete classrooms and dirty rundown toilets.

Under the “Nutrition and Hygiene Education” project funded by the US Department of Agriculture and implemented by the Viet Nam Red Cross societies in remote regions of the country, financial aid will be provided to improved sanitation at 166 schools in poor provinces, including the construction or upgrading of 130 toilet blocks and 130 wells.

Lai Chau Province, with 27 schools on the list, has been allocated VND1.5 billion (US$88,800) for 22 sanitation projects, to serve about 10,000 students.

Local authorities said the projects would solve the problem of children having to defecate outdoors.

But improving sanitation was only part of the problem, Provincial People’s Committee deputy-chairman Vuong Van Thanh said.

Schools in mountainous regions also were short of classrooms, especially for pre-school kids, clean water supply systems and community based boarding systems.

And many remote schools didn’t have access to the project because of transport difficulties.

NA deputy Ngo Thi Minh agreed. She said people in remote areas were scattered making it difficult to provide them with access to schools, medical centres and other welfare projects.

She suggested local authorities in the 61 poorest communes nationwide be encouraged to gather people into communities.

“This is one of the solutions that I have proposed to the National Assembly and waiting for instruction from the Government,” she said.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News

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