In Safe Hands?: Water and Sanitation in Africa

  Happy World Toilet Day! This year, the theme of the annual World Toilet Day was ‘ sustainable solutions and climate change’ , which is becoming increasingly necessary to pay attention to, given the pressing concerns that the global climate crisis imposes. With frequent flooding episodes and drought periods, sanitation systems are under threat (ibid) and in order for communities to remain resilient to the risks of climate change, they must adapt to more sustainable approaches. But before exploring how existing systems can be improved, a closer examination of the current systems is needed, which  Naafs (2020) excellently summarises in Figure 1. The diagram identifies what points within the sanitation service chain are vulnerable to climate change:    Of the four interactions that Naafs highlights, the ‘need for resource recovery’ at the end of the sanitation chain is particularly interesting to explore in the context of Africa, given the diverse sanitation practices...

  The " Friday Evening Problem" : Reflections on Decolonising Knowledge in the African WASH sector Annually, millions of dollars are splurged by organisations in the Global North on hosting large-scale conferences and events   dedicated to ‘sharing knowledge’ and capacity building. But what happens after that? The barriers existing between learning a new approach and actually implementing this within a project has been coined the Monday morning problem , and the study by Results for Development (2014) highlight several avenues for what needs to be done differently. But these suggestions address only the symptoms of a much deeper problem. The reality is that the bureaucratic functioning of Global North actors contrasts the concerns and interests that require attention in Africa, and so obstacles to impactful work arise. But more importantly, Africa’s WASH sector being dominated by actors from the Global North- who often impose their Western knowledge without appreciating the ...

  Sanitation Taboos: Menstrual Hygiene  Sanitation is far from homogenous, as Mcfarlane et al. (2014) explores in their paper about how sanitation is produced and sustained in informal settlements. A gendered lens is therefore needed to unveil some of the disparities in “everyday sanitation” that women experience. Women disproportionately bear the difficulties of sanitation inadequacies ( Bapat and Agarwal 2003 ) but are reluctant to discuss their experiences- partly because they deem water access and quality as more important than sanitation (ibid). Although they are intrinsically linked, Curtis et al. (2000) note that improved health outcomes are dependant more on adequate sanitation facilities (such as waste disposal) than water provision; reiterating the importance of sanitation that is often undervalued. But the key factor that underpins why sanitation is overlooked is that is a ‘taboo’ topic across several cultures around the world, including within Africa. It is unc...

  Safe Water  In 2010, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognised water and sanitation to be a human right. One aspect that defines this right is that water must be ‘safe’- free from microorganisms and other substances that can threaten one’s health. Chlorine has been used for over a century to disinfect water. It has contributed substantially to the increase in access to safe drinking water for millions of people around the world as it can be incorporated on varying scales- ranging from piped networks in urban areas, to household treatments in rural settings. Chlorination is regarded as the most affordable, reliable and effective method of water purification, especially because of its ability to kill the majority of pathogens responsible for diarrheal diseases in children (GEMS, 2018); thus being an approach endorsed by the WHO to improve water quality (2003). There is a plethora of epidemiology and economics literature that has concluded the wide-reaching...