A blue plastic bucket in the farmyard, next to the chicken coop, is the only space reserved for faeces in the home of Romanian couple Valentin, 57, and Mirela, 52, of Podu Văleni, a village in Prahova County, about 40 km from Bucharest. They both suffer from epilepsy. “In this country, people with disabilities are treated worse than scum,” he grumbles.
Mirela, in a flowery T-shirt and leggings, turns a tin pan upside down and sits on it: “I hate this place,” she says. There is cardboard on the windows, a cooker and two mattresses surrounded by bottles of medicine. She exhibits the cloths she has embroidered to turn the space into a home.
A plastic saucepan hangs on one wall, next to pictures of saints, a pair of scissors and a clock. Food is made on a butane canister next to a small cooker. Outside, there is a ramshackle car, scrap metal and a bicycle that Valentin rides to the station to do his shopping. Then there is the toilet, or rather the lack thereof; Valentin and Mirela are two of the almost three million Romanians who do not have a toilet at home.
One in six people in Romania (15.4%) do not have a flushing toilet inside their home connected to the water and sewerage network, according to the latest Eurostat data (2023). The figure has fallen by almost seven points since 2020 (22.8%) and by almost half since 2017 (29.7%) but is still shocking. “These are families in very deprived areas, where there are no sewage systems, with many children and older people; this is the case in the village of Tonciu in Faragau,” explains a family doctor’s assistant in Mures county, Transylvania, who prefers not to give her name.
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The lack of safe sanitation even extends to some schools. This school year, beginning on 9th September in Romania, 70 schools still had “inadequate toilets”, Romanian Education Minister Ligia Deca told a press conference. This sometimes means a wooden cabin in the courtyard, with a latrine.
In Bulgaria (9.6%), Latvia (6%) and Lithuania (5%), thousands of people also live without a toilet, though these numbers are falling. Over the course of the pandemic, while social media was full of citizens worried about stockpiling toilet paper, 1.8% of the EU’s inhabitants had no access to a flushing toilet at home – some eight million people.
Who are the Europeans without a toilet?
Valentin and Mirela’s story is one of those invisible, marginalised, layered tales. Valentin worked “as a mechanic, watchmaker and tinkerer…” in Bucharest, until he suffered two heart attacks and was declared unfit for work while Mirela suffers from mental problems. They were evicted from the house they were renting when it was put up for sale.
“Sanitation remains a major problem in European countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Lithuania,” Sarika Saluja, director of the World Toilet Organization (WTO), told El Confidencial in an email. The causes, she says, are a combination of “socio-economic inequalities, inadequate infrastructure and rural isolation”. “Romania has been left behind due to a lack of investment in rural infrastructure and utilities,” she adds.
In 2022, only 59.2% of Romania’s population was connected to sewage collection systems, according to the Romanian National Institute of Statistics, and the rest have to fend for themselves. “These are families who can hardly get food, water and electricity, how are they going to renovate the bathroom?” asks Gina Neacsu of the Building Association of Daruri, which supports children from poor households. This is a part of Europe without sewers.
No toilets in Lithuania and Hungary, the marginalisation map
In 2017, the European Commission gave Lithuania a warning to end outdoor latrines and improve wastewater management, a breeding ground for bacteria. A European directive requires at least 98% of wastewater from settlements with more than 2,000 inhabitants must be collected through centralised systems.
Since then, “we are working with municipalities and companies and providing funding,” says Irmantas Valūnas, advisor to the Pollution Prevention Policy Group of the Lithuanian Environment Ministry. He cites more than €10 million invested from national programmes and €56 million from the Water Management Fund to build infrastructure. The EU has also provided €139 million to the water sector for the period 2021-2027.
There are “multiple” reasons for the shortfall in sewage provision says Agne Kazlauskiene, Environment and Energy Advisor of the Association of Lithuanian Municipalities. Firstly, she says, the development of infrastructure for sewage and drinking water networks “is a complex and continuous process”, which, she says, “cannot be directed at wherever and whomever you want it to be directed; development is centralised and new sewage provision tends to be directed at areas with higher population density, new construction and renovation”.
Added to this, she says, is local reticence amongst the most vulnerable and the elderly, who don’t want change. “Even when the pipes are installed next to them, not everyone is willing to connect to the public network,” she says. Still, she says that municipalities have set targets and progress is welcome. If in 2017, there were 12.2% of households without a flush toilet in Lithuania; today, it is now 5%. In rural areas, it is 13.2% (half of the 28.6% in 2017).
Over the course of the pandemic, while social media was full of citizens worried about stockpiling toilet paper, 1.8% of the EU’s inhabitants had no access to a flushing toilet at home – some 8 million people
In Hungary, also sees wide inequalities between city centres and outskirts and also between its regions. In 2021, 3.2% of inhabitants did not have indoor toilets, according to the census. However, on closer inspection “there are six counties where the number of households without toilets in their villages exceeds 10%,” according to György Lukács, Policy Officer at Habitat for Humanity Hungary, an organisation that provides renovation grants in Hungary through the TÁMASZ programme. “The most deprived areas of the country top the list,” he adds. In 2021, 86,000 Hungarian households had no toilets, according to EU SILC data, and 117,000 had no running water, “without which it is difficult to run a flushing toilet”, Lukács adds.
This is the Europe that in winter goes out into the courtyard to defecate into a latrine, which, in summer, becomes filled with flies; a health hazard, “with a risk of urinary tract infections and difficulties in maintaining menstrual hygiene”, explains Saluja, “which generates shame, stigma and an increased risk of infection”, but, “also an environmental and public health risk”, she continues.
0.4% of Spain households have no flushing toilet
When, in 2020, the UN Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, visited the Cañada Real in Madrid and the Polígono Sur in Seville, he was stunned. In Spain, the percentage of the population without access to a flushing toilet in their homes was 0.4% in 2020, according to the most recent Eurostat data for the country, which collects this information every three years on an optional basis. In addition, although there are no specific studies on Spanish toilet coverage, UNICEF estimates that 3.4% of the population suffers from what it describes as “severe housing deprivation”, which includes overcrowding, leaks, lack of light and not having a bathroom or indoor toilet. This makes up 6.2% of the child population, more than half a million children in Spain. In addition, some 50,000 people live in substandard housing or shantytowns, according to the Fundación Secretariado Gitano.
Their scarcity in numbers is a double-edged sword in and of itself, as Cristina de la Serna Sandoval, Director of the Department of Equality and Fighting Discrimination at the Fundación Secretariado Gitano, explained to El Confidencial over the phone. On the one hand, because there are few of them, they are invisible; on the other hand, “it is precisely because there are so few of them, they are problems that could be economically tackled by the state”. For De la Serna, “the data reveals structural racism”. “Let’s say that the majority of the people living in these conditions are not Caucasian,” she adds. She explains that they conducted 688 surveys in twenty-six shantytowns in Spain and found that 92% of their inhabitants belonged to minorities; 77% were Roma and 13% were of Arab origin. “It’s terrible,” she laments, “half of them are under 16 and of those, 40% are babies, under six years old”.
For Sarika Saluja, Director of WTO, “political will is needed to invest in sanitation” and she says that there are cases in the world that show that it can be achieved, with innovative financing mechanisms, such as microfinance and subsidies and maintenance education for users, to ensure their sustainability once installed.
She gives the ambitious example of India, where through the 2014 Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission, the government built 90 million toilets in just five years.