Africa: The Water and Sanitation Challenge

Lagos in Nigeria, Nairobi in Kenya, and Cape Town in South Africa are three internationally recognised digital hubs in Africa, with more than thousands of start-ups and etc. landed in these places ( IMF, 2021 ). Amongst these three places, I have briefly touched on the technologies emerged in Nairobi by talking about the Sanergy toilets . Today, as the last post of this blog, I would like to explore on this edgy-cutting topic. To investigate how technologies reshape sanitation solutions and practices, let's go back to Nairobi and dig deeper.  Kenya has been praised as the Silicon Savannah . About 4 in 10 people in Kenya has internet access. As its capital city, Nairobi is a leading site for Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs) development in this decade (Graham and Mann, 2013 cited in Chambers and Evans, 2020 ). It is also a place that has large areas of informal settlements. One of the most famous informal settlements, Kibera accounts for about 6% of the capital land but is

In previous posts, we talked about how human wastes contaminated water resources , and posed public health problems particularly in the peri-urban or urban poor regions in Africa, framing human wastes as severe public health risks. In the last post, I talked about a sustainable project: Sanergy . The emergence of this dry-toilet sanitation solution provoked my reader to ask how can poos be used as commercial products that can be used and sold as fertilisers when they are unhygienic.  A simple answer in terms of whether the two practices undermine the other is NO . Rather, these two practices reflect changing discourses in sanitation solutions. They say that the development agents acknowledged more about local environments, mirroring a wider trend in development field: from mainstream modernisation discourse to an emphasis on participatory development.    Poos are wastes and pose public health risks   Colonialists replicated water-borne sanitation solution sewage system as part of the m

 Let's Celebrate World Toilet's Day!  🗺🚽👏 Dancing on Toilet ;)  Source: Sartle blog Quick Facts about the World Toilet's Day 2021:  It aims to raise awareness of the 3.6 billion people living without access to safely managed sanitation  It is about taking action to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6: Water and Sanitation for all by 2030  It is about valuing Toilets  A toilet that effectively captures human waste in a safe, accessible, and dignified setting can help achieve sustainable sanitation  Source: World Toilet's Day Factsheet   As Appadurai suggested in his discussion about the Mumbai Toilet exhibition in one of his papers, it is important that we keep on a horizontal networking. It will help urban residents across the world to learn from each other and facilitate a better world. Under this ideal, on the World Toilet's Day, I would like to introduce you to Sanergy, a company and an NGO providing an innovated, non-sewered sanitation solution in Nairobi

This post is the second part of my article about the human waste problems in Kampala, Uganda. Please click on this link to read the first half of the article.  The Flying Toilets Although 99% of the surveyed population reported that they have access to sanitation facilities, commonly the pit latrines, they choose not to use them. One common alternative is flying toilets. About 15% of the population said that they will use the flying toilets. Flying toilets is a practice that uses polythene bags as containers and discards after usage. Sometimes, the disposals are not properly managed. The polythene bags are randomly thrown in the open drainage. In Kulabako et al (2010) 's research about the problems and constraints existing in the urban poor areas in Kampala, the team also revealed that flying toilets can also be found on the roofs. If the households collect rainwater from roof catchments, the pathogens in human waste entered the households through the water.  Flying Toilets pil

In my last post , I suggested that we should investigate in how human waste goes into the water. Today, instead of talking about the Africa as a whole, we are only focusing on one city -- Kampala.  Kampala City Source: Breathelife2030 Kampala is the capital city of Uganda. It locates around the Equator, has a warm tropical climate and characterises one dry and one wet season annually. As one of the fastest-growing cities in Africa, the population in Kampala metro area hits 3,470,000 in 2021. In 2016, UNICEF reported that 70% of the population lived in slums with the total population estimated at 1.6 million in Kampala . Since the urban population has almost doubled, it is deductively assumed that the slum population nowadays should be more than 3 million. To understand the human waste problem in the urban poor areas, I reviewed five research conducted by African scholars. The pieces of literature are published in the 2010s. They tell some stories mainly about the pit latrines and othe

This blog is inspired by a figure (see Figure 1) that I came across when reading Thompson et al (2000) 's research about the changes in urban water use in East Africa between 1967 and 1997.  Figure 1. Mean per Capita Water Use in Urban Areas of East Africa Overall, the mean per capita water use in urban areas in East Africa decreased over the three decades. The water use from piped water sources also decreased. However, the usage of unpiped water resources increased. Mathematically, the compound annual annual growth rate (CAGR) of the unpiped water resource is 1.53% and -2.18% for piped water resources. It means that every year people would reduce their piped water usage by 2.18% as compared to last year and increase their water usage from unpiped resources by 1.53%.  Now, let's think about what else had happened during that period. Africa went through an accelerating urbanisation process. Maps produced by OECD (see Figure 2) show that in 1970, there were only 4 countries that