In Safe Hands?: Water and Sanitation in Africa

  Waving Goodbye: Personal Reflections on Water and Sanitation in Africa. When beginning this blog series, the theme of Water and Sanitation in Africa stood out to me particularly given it’s importance- it is a basic human right that unfortunately 1/3 of the global population does not enjoy . The 6 th Sustainable Development Goal clearly identifies the necessity of Clean Water and Sanitation for all, yet despite this, the sanitation deficit across the globe are alarming and require serious attention- even more so at a time when we are experiencing a global pandemic. Over the course of this blog, I have tried to explore a range of Water and Sanitation problems in Africa, and opportunities for how to tackle them. But the common denominator for all the possible solutions I discuss is community engagement. Whether it be through capacity building and empowering them with the right tools and support, or introducing low-cost, innovative facilities- all we need to start progressing in...

Tippy Tap Water Hack - adapting to 'scarcity' during COVID-19  Underpinning the WASH challenges in Africa is the concept of water scarcity that many countries face, which refers to over 1000 people competing for a single flow unit of 1,000,000m^3 per year (equivalent to less than 1000m^3/person/year). But this approach to understanding water scarcity is disputed as being dominated by a reductionist, physical evaluation; failing to acknowledge the limitations to the distribution and access to water which is contingent on an array of complex factors including political, economic, and social determinants. Regardless of what metric is used to define the relationship between water and people, the bottom line is that there is indeed inequitable access to clean water across Africa, which thereby compromises their sanitation and hygiene- and is a great threat to public health. The merits of handwashing for public health, for example, has been studied widely over the past decades- pa...

  sourced from: http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/12/human-rights-not-sanitation-workers/  "Sanitation is Dignity"… but what about the Dignity of Sanitation Workers? The saying “water is life, but sanitation is dignity” is widely used in the WASH discourse to draw attention to how overlooked sanitation is in development agendas. But what is even more neglected is the actors that uphold informal sanitation systems. Places like Ougadougou, Burkina Faso, where over 26% of waste is managed with little more than bare hands, highlights how sanitation workers are at the forefront of providing an essential service within densely populated urban communities, where there is an absence of a working sewerage system. Insights from situated Urban Political Ecology (UPE), a geographical subfield that seeks to understand the (re)production of inequalities in urban environment through “an engagement with the everyday that is rooted in local contexts and identities” (Cornea et al.2017: 730) , ...