Africa: The Water and Sanitation Challenge

 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 sanita...

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 Toilet...

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 ...