Shelter Associates Crosses the 14,000 Milestone of Facilitating Household Toilets

Shelter Associates, a Pune-based NGO working towards an open defecation-free nation, has now delivered 14,000 household toilets in Maharashtra impacting more than 3,60,000 lives. In line with the Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), Shelter Associates has been steadily impacting lives in 6 urban cities in Maharashtra with their data-driven and community centric model, ‘One Home One Toilet’.

Their work has undergone a third-party assessment by Pune-based, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. The evaluation study was a pre-post case-control study over the period of 1+ year and covering a sample size of nearly 400 households from 16 slums across 4 cities – Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Sangli-Miraj and Kolhapur. Assessment focuses on six urban slums across the regions of Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Sangli-Miraj, and Kolhapur. The Assessment Report revealed these facts:

• During the baseline, 86.1% of adolescent girls were using community toilets while 13.9% were practicing open defecation. After the household toilets were built, 100% adolescent girls started using individual household toilets
• 93.5% children under the age of five started using individual toilets
• 68% of time was saved by having an individual toilet in households
• Open defecation dropped by 29.6% percentage points

Pratima Joshi, Co-founder and Executive Director of Shelter Associates, said, “A lot of credit must be given to the residents of the economically backward settlements, who have been open and adaptive to the change from Community Toilet Blocks to individual toilets, understanding the importance of sanitation and safety for girls and women. It is a cause for great pride that we have been able to facilitate 14,000 household toilets – impacting the lives of all these families. While we still have a long way to go, every milestone achieved motivate us even further.”