Water Sanitation Issues in Africa

Let's play an interesting game... Analyse the following cards (from the Centre for Affordable water and sanitation technology: CAWST ), rank them in order of most sanitary to least:   The truth of the matter is that this is not a game, but a reality of everyday life for around 4.1 billion people around the world. The 'game' does however raise interesting questions about evidence of 'progress' when we think about sanitation. The WHO has developed a very helpful guide on sanitation, one in which we can see the progress that a country or region is making, they call it the 'Sanitation ladder', in which presumably countries and regions are meant to climb rather than descend. The below example is from Water Aid and includes a description of each rung, as well as the number of people involved in that particular step. Water Aid's Sanitation ladder India is often touted as an example of where governmental policy under the Swachh Bahrat ...

Take some time to analyse this picture: It took me a bit of time to fully digest what is happening in this picture, thinking about what conclusions could be drawn from it based on all that we know so far about sanitation, but also the wider geographical and historical conclusions that we could make- it is a fascinating picture. This is the reality of bucket toilets - a service provided by governments to remove human waste in order to improve the sanitation of an area in the township of Ezenzeleni, Cape Town. Cape Town, according to C. Mcfarlane and J Silver (2017), has become the 'Poolitical City', where issues around sanitation has been forced out into the open.  Where the government has been forced to confront some of the inadequacies of its provision on sanitation and people have openly discussed, and protested about sanitation. It makes for a hugely interesting place to study as a result. Driving this are the pressures that many cities around the world are ...

My principle take from George's Ted talk and initial reading of her book 'The Big Necessity' was that sanitation is the key to water security- no matter the amount of water you have, if you don't have sanitation, disease will increase with multiplier effects occurring from then on. Children become ill ⇨can't attend school⇨get a poorer education⇨have less life opportunities etc. However one of the joys of carrying out wider reading on this topic is that you continuously learn and I can happily say that I was wrong about my take on sanitation issues! Both J. Tucker et al (2014) and J. Thomson et al (2000) suggest that this understanding of water security and sanitation is not completely correct. Thompson suggests that " Less water in the home means less water available for washing hands after defecating, for cleaning utensils after cooking and eating, and for regular bathing of both adults and children ", suggesting that in fact quantit...

Some interesting facts from Rose's 'The Big necessity' to start you off: 2.6 Billion people don't have access to sanitation 4 in 10 don't have access to latrines, toilets, buckets or boxes Poor sanitation causes 1 in 10 of the world's diseases In the last decade Diarrhoea has killed more people than all people killed in WW2 Rose George has had a huge impact on me since watching her TED talk a few years ago. Every year I show her 'Let's talk crap' Ted Talk in its entirety to Year 9s when studying 'Challenges of Urban growth'. Students are fascinated by her message: We simply do not talk enough about sanitation. And we need to. We need to if we are going to have a significant impact on a vast array of development areas within the Sustainable Development goals: Water, Health, Gender are but some of the key issues. In my blog I plan to look into why sanitation is so important. I'll look at case studies where sanitation sche...