Côte d’Ivoire now has a National Toilets for All Association (ANT-CI). The constituent general Assembly was held on Wednesday 30 October 2019 at the premises of the National Corporation for Sanitation and Drainage (ONAD), with the Director General of this national entity also in attendance including the Executive Director of the AfWA. At the end of the elections, Ms. Sié Julienne, Hydraulic Engineer at ONAD, was elected from among her peers to lead the Association for a 3-year term of office.

ANT—CI emanates from the World Toilet Organization, founded in 2001 and which aims at forming a network of all health and sanitation organizations in order to share the know-how, to exercise its visibility in the media and lobby governments for the implementation of more effective public health and sanitation policies. Indeed, according to the 2017 WHO-UNICEF Common Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, about 60 % of the world population, representing 4.5 billion people do not have toilets in their houses; or they have toilets but faecal matter cannot be hygienically managed and 892 million people in the world practise open defecation since they do not have toilets. The faecal matter is therefore not collected nor is it treated.

To contribute to mitigating this state of affairs and promote access to toilets for all, the Scientific and Technical Council of the AfWA, through its Specialized Committee in charge of Sanitation, has encouraged its members to set up National Toilets Associations in their countries. Thus, the one in Côte d’Ivoire has been established within a local context marked by 22% of the total population, or 3.5 million people engaged in open air defecation (MICS, 2016) . Thus, the ANT hopes to contribute to the government’s goal of totally eradicating open air defecation in urban centers and to curb it in the rural communities from 51% to 15% by 2030. The new Chairperson of ANT thanked her peers for electing her and appealed for unity among the stakeholders in the sanitation sector in order to achieve the goals set by the Association.