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...