Empowering Communities to Sustain Sanitation and Hygiene Amidst Cyclone Freddy
Nesta Liwonde, a granny from Nkawera village in the area of Traditional Authority (T/A) Nkanda in Mulanje district has bitter memories of the 2023 Tropical Cyclone Freddy, which devastated her area and left her entire family and community hopeless.
She quickly recalls: “Cyclone Freddy not only washed away my maize field, but also demolished my toilet, bathroom, and part of my house. This disrupted our home sanitation and hygiene practices because we were forced to use a communal toilet and sometimes open spaces to answer the calls of nature.”
Since 2019, some parts of Malawi have been hit by Tropical Cyclones like Cyclone Freddy, which has resulted in massive mudslides. On March 12, 2023, alone, 14 of Malawi’s 28 districts were hit by devastating Cyclone Freddy, which lasted 35 days and was recorded as one of the longest and most powerful cyclones ever in the Southern Hemisphere. Cyclone Freddy greatly impacted the Southern districts of Mulanje, Blantyre, Phalombe, Chikwawa and Nsanje.
Cyclone Freddy killed more than 1,000 Malawians and destroyed about 120,000 hectares of farmland, countless homes, roads, bridges, schools and other infrastructures. The 2023 Cyclone Freddy also contributed to the cholera outbreak which killed more than 1, 700 Malawians.
According to Liwonde, her village, which used to be a model with proper sanitation facilities like toilets, was not spared by the ravages of Cyclone Freddy, which affected most parts of Southern Malawi, including Mulanje. The Cyclone Freddy came with floods which damaged a lot of infrastructure in Nkawera village, including toilets. As a result, the village was left with few toilets, forcing households to defecate in the open or share a few toilets which were still standing.
“The destruction of the sanitation facilities by Cyclone Freddy in our village led to a new behaviour where four to five families were forced to share one toilet. On average, one toilet was being used by over 30 people, a development which made our lives unbearable,” said Liwonde.
She said poor sanitation facilities led to poor hygiene practices which exposed her family (especially children) and other community members to waterborne disease threats like cholera. However, she was grateful to the intervention by Applied Development Communication and Training Services (ADECOTS) which influenced her alongside other community members to reconstruct the sanitation facilities to sustain hygiene practices all the time.
With support from UNICEF, ADECOTS implemented Zikutivuta Pati, a project which thrived on building the capacity of communities to sustain sanitation and hygiene practices during and after Cyclone Freddy. The project trained community health volunteers to effectively engage affected members of the community through a door-to-door approach to influence them to uphold sanitation and hygiene aimed at combating further disease outbreaks like cholera and malaria.
“I reconstructed my toilet when ADECOTS health volunteers educated me on issues of sanitation and hygiene. I was happy to be visited by these officers because I had no idea how bad it was to have no toilet or observe hygiene all the time,” said Liwonde.
Liwonde is one of many community members who were visited by ADECOTS community-based health volunteers and were motivated to reconstruct a toilet and other sanitation facilities.
Paul Eliya is one of the community-based health volunteers from Nkawera village who received training from ADECOTS to effect change in his community. He has been working hand-in-hand with the Village Group Headman (GVH) Nkawera in engaging the community members to have sanitation facilities.Eliya said he visited all the households in the Nkawera village and carried out exclusive engagements where he found out that some households were not able to construct toilets during and after Cyclone Freddy due to negligence and lack of knowledge on the consequences of poor sanitation and hygiene practices.
“Working with community leaders like GVH Nkawera was exciting because he came up with bylaws to ensure that every household commit to sanitation and hygiene practices. And this worked because at the end of the day, people reconstructed sanitary facilities, especially toilets, to fight waterborne diseases and the tendency of using communal toilets,” said Eliya.
Eliya boasted that through effective engagements with households in his village, he managed to influence 55 households out of 60 households to rebuild and have their permanent toilets.
GVH Nkawera said the Zikutivuta Pati project helped his area from needless deaths caused by preventable waterborne diseases like cholera.
“Knowledge is power. ADECOTS taught us about sanitation and hygiene to fight diseases and this encouraged us to take action which saved us,” said GVH Nkawera.