Where Do You Go When You Gotta Go? | Dr. Marakie Tesfaye | TEDxLogan Circle

Quick Overview

Dr. Marakie Tesfaye argues that access to safe, private, and dignified sanitation facilities, particularly toilets, is not just a technical issue but a fundamental matter of human rights, safety, autonomy, and gender equality, directly impacting girls' education and their future potential.

Key Points: Globally, 1 in 3 people lack access to basic sanitation, costing women 98 billion hours annually due to lack of access to toilets. The lack of a toilet determines a girl's future safety, autonomy, and gender power dynamics, as she may be forced to miss up to 100 days of school per year due to menstruation. Dr. Tesfaye launched a social impact business called 'Jegnit' (meaning brave woman) to advocate for the removal of tax on feminine hygiene products. Her research revealed that girls in Ethiopia often avoided drinking water at school to delay using unsanitary toilets, leading to dehydration and health issues like UTIs and kidney disease. The speaker asserts that poor sanitation is a political issue, not merely a plumbing problem, and that silence perpetuates this injustice. She advocates for systemic change, emphasizing that merely building toilets is insufficient; the focus must shift to dignity, voice, presence, access, and power.

Context: Dr. Marakie Tesfaye delivers a TEDx talk titled "Where Do You Go When You Gotta Go?" at TEDxLogan Circle, sharing her personal journey from growing up in Ethiopia with a comfortable but unluxurious life to realizing the global crisis of inadequate sanitation. She uses her experience and research to highlight how the lack of proper toilet access disproportionately affects women and girls, linking it directly to issues of human rights, education, and empowerment.

Detailed Analysis

Dr. Marakie Tesfaye discusses the global sanitation crisis, emphasizing that the lack of proper toilet access affects one in three people worldwide, costing women 98 billion hours annually. She recounts her childhood in Ethiopia, where, despite not having a luxurious life, she never considered the lack of water access a major issue until moving to the US. Upon returning to Ethiopia in her early 20s, she realized the severity of the problem: girls avoided drinking water at school to delay using unsafe toilets, leading to health crises like UTIs and kidney disease. She highlights that for women, the absence of a toilet determines their future safety, autonomy, and power dynamics, often resulting in girls missing up to 100 days of school per year due to menstruation. Tesfaye founded the social impact business 'Jegnit' (meaning brave woman) to advocate for systemic change, including removing taxes on feminine hygiene products. She concludes that sanitation is a political issue, not just a plumbing one, and that liberation requires addressing the dignity, voice, presence, access, and power inherent in having a safe place to relieve oneself.