Water and Sanitation in Africa

 Hi and welcome back to the blog! To wrap up I'll be talking about some of the creative solutions I have come across that could be more ef fective than 'changing social behaviour' or only building toilets. Firstly, I will not deny that in some cases the issues are rather straightforward and so are their fixes. For example,  Nakagiri   in their study found that in Kampala, the majority of latrines were full (51%) or even overflowing (15%). Most were dirty (43%) and in their survey, 89% of respondents expressed the need to improve the state and performance of the latrines. They concluded that pit latrines in the urban slums of Kampala were overloaded. Suggestions were made for interventions to improve the pit latrine should tackle the design and operation, with specific suggestions for    "minimising water inflows into the pit, increasing the air flow rate, minimising light in the superstructures."  IkoToilet in Kosovo One way to reduce open defecation and th...

 Hi and welcome back! In this post I'll be talking a bit about how colonialism still lingers through politics and the WASH Sector. I'll also be talking a bit about responsiblity (or a lack of it) and how this impacts the solutions to water and sanitation.  Cape Town  In 2013, Cape Town saw 'poolitical' protests in response to the inadequate provision of sanitation services (such as open air toilets) by the government. This included raw sewage and faeces being thrown at political opponents. However, this represented a much larger issue of inadequate sanitation and the ever increasing inequalities being 'expressed materially in basic infrastructures' .   WASH history and how this impacts decisions for solutions now It is all thought to stem from the colonial imagination where binaries exist, separating clean and sanitary Europeans from their disgusting colonial 'others' . This created 'geographies of contamination' linked to dirty, undrained and ...

 Hi and welcome back to the blog! In this post I hope to convey that water and sanitation issues are not just physical but social and heavily gendered. It is very important that we understand the social context of water and sanitation issues are so that we are able to develop or implement solutions that are effective. When we consider the issue of sanitation and open defecation in Africa we often fall into the trap of oversimplifying the problem and attributing open defecation to a lack of toilets or poorly built pit latrines. This is sometimes true but the complexity lies within the social contexts. Ask yourself this: Would I use a toilet if the stall was full of flies/smelled?  The presence of flies is a simple yet significant example that shows how sanitation issues are, in fact, quite social. More importantly, Tsinda's study in Kigali, Rwanda suggests smell and the presence of flies was actually a contributing factor to latrine usage. The same was found by Kwiringa in Ka...

 Hi and welcome back to the blog! In the last post I talked about how water quality issues have been oversimplified by some charities in the media and, with the help of Boakye-Ansah's work, how sometimes the problems may be more political than they seem.  In this post we'll be looking at Lukaya, Uganda. In particular the on-site facilities available, their advantages (which helps explain why they're used) and also some of the issues that have been found.  1. The Water In Lukaya, the main sources of water are unprotected springs and shallow wells with hand pumps ( Nayebare et al. 2020 ). an image of a shallow well in Kenya (   source  ) So shallow wells are holes which have been dug/bored or drilled into the ground. They work by allowing people to access groundwater from an aquifer.  Shallow wells are only 'shallow' if they are less than ~50 feet deep.  So what are the pros/cons? Well (pardon the pun), the advantages of wells are that they allow people ...

 Hi and welcome back to my blog on Water and Sanitation in Africa. In this post, I have come across some interesting literature regarding water quality in Lilongwe, Malawi that challenged mainstream, oversimplified ideas. The background: As of this year, an estimated 1,170,000 people live in Lilongwe with a growth rate of 4.38%( World Population Review )compared to a total 19,800,000 in Malawi ( World Population Review ).   According to  UNICEF , there is an inequality between urban and rural areas. Improved drinking water sources are said to be more common 'at 87%' in urban areas than rural '63%'. What does that even mean? 87% coverage? What does 87% coverage even look like?   More people living in rural areas have to spend more time collecting water than those in urban areas.   More importantly, however, are the reasons proposed: Neglected/Old Water points Poor access to sanitation services Increased Droughts and Floods Poor hygienic practice (i...

Why Water and Sanitation? Hi and welcome to the first post of my blog!  This post will be about why I've chosen this particular theme for my blog and some of the ideas that I've found very interesting in the  papers from the reading list so far. What is sanitation? According to the Cambridge dictionary , sanitation is 'the systems for taking dirty water and other waste products away from buildings in order to protect people's health'.  Sanitation is recognized as a human right by the UN General Assembly yet not everyone has access to adequate sanitation. Why the theme? Personal Experience Well, the majority of my childhood was spent living in Mauritius where we had to boil our tap water and let it cool before drinking. I remember in my time at secondary school here in the UK, I was made aware of the fact that the water from my tap here had been treated and was safe to drink without having to boil (and also that limescale was the result of hard water an...