Share of primary schools with toilets
What you should know about this indicator
- Access to separate toilets for girls and boys is essential for dignity, privacy, and hygiene — this indicator shows how many primary schools provide this basic facility.
- It measures the proportion of primary schools with basic sanitation facilities that are single-sex, meaning there are separate, usable toilets for male and female students on site.
- Basic sanitation facilities include functional and private toilets that hygienically separate human waste from human contact and are not shared with other buildings or the public.
- A high percentage indicates better readiness of the school system to provide a safe and inclusive learning environment, especially for girls, who may be more likely to miss school without such facilities.
- The data is typically collected through national school censuses or Education Management Information Systems (EMIS) and is reported by school officials.
- Disaggregating this indicator by urban/rural location, region, or public/private management can help identify disparities in access to gender-sensitive school infrastructure.
- Some limitations include potential discrepancies in how countries define or report "usable" or "functional" toilets, and whether cleanliness, maintenance, or disability access are accounted for.
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Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Share of primary schools with toilets”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2023) - “Global Education”. Data adapted from UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/percentage-of-primary-schools-with-toilets.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in DataFull citation
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Share of primary schools with toilets” [dataset]. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, “UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) - Education” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/percentage-of-primary-schools-with-toilets.html (archived on March 4, 2026).Download
Quick download
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/percentage-of-primary-schools-with-toilets.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/percentage-of-primary-schools-with-toilets.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/percentage-of-primary-schools-with-toilets.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/percentage-of-primary-schools-with-toilets.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/percentage-of-primary-schools-with-toilets.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/percentage-of-primary-schools-with-toilets.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/percentage-of-primary-schools-with-toilets.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/percentage-of-primary-schools-with-toilets.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear