At the end of 2024, South Africa’s Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube said her department would eradicate all remaining ‘identified’ pit toilets in schools across the country by 31 March 2025.
The deadline wasn’t met.
On 5 April, Gwarube said they had upgraded the toilet facilities at 96% of the target schools.
The target the minister is speaking about was set after a 2018 audit of school sanitation for an initiative called Sanitation Appropriate for Education (SAFE), which identified 3,375 schools in need of upgrades.
This chart visualises the number of schools with basic pit toilets reported in the Education Facility Management System (EFMS), which is where the Department of Basic Education captures information about school infrastructure. It used to be called the National Education Information Management System (Neims). The latest EFMS report, dated 3 July 2024, lists 287 schools with basic pit latrines as their only toilets in three provinces, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.
See also Pits in 3 provinces

Get the data used in the chart on DataDesk