Water and Sanitation in Africa

 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 ...