Abstract
An environmental health assessment of 210 households located in four communities in the Ezulwini Valley, Swaziland, is summarized. The assessment focused on household-scale environmental health in the context of four key resource sectors: drinking water, energy, solid waste and human waste, with availability and perceived adequacy considered for each sector. The survey was administered in the field by small teams of students alongside Swazi community members, utilizing a snowball sampling strategy with stratification by economic class. Electronic administration via mobile devices assisted in geolocating records, minimizing entry error and rapidly compiling results for daily review and analysis. Results indicate challenges in household access to basic resources and resource impacts, even in this relatively developed part of Swaziland; these results varied considerably by community and economic class, and were only somewhat comparable to previous national-scale assessments. In a larger context, international efforts toward improving household-scale environmental health conditions (e.g., via related UN Millennium Development Goals) are laudable, yet these results corroborate other research suggesting that progress can be difficult to measure, and is decidedly uneven by household location and socioeconomic status. Key words: Swaziland, environmental health, water, sanitation, solid waste, fuelwood, Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Highlights
Situating global environmental healthThe field of environmental health is as broad as our many needs for well-being and safe surroundings
A similar disparity is evident in overall household energy results, where over two out of three surveyed households have access to electricity, yet less than one in three use electricity for cooking- in this case, a result that varied significantly according to household economic class
As suggested at the outset, this reality is not limited to the Ezulwini Valley nor Swaziland: in the context of urbanizing areas, for instance, “...the health impacts of the most serious problems are largely confined to lower-income groups....It is common for the residential areas of middle- and upper-income groups...to receive good quality water supplies, sewers, drains, electricity supplies and regular services to remove solid waste while 30% or more of the city population on the poorer residential areas receive little or nothing” (Hardoy et al, 2001)
Summary
The field of environmental health is as broad as our many needs for well-being and safe surroundings. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), environmental health “...addresses all the physical, chemical and biological factors external to a person, and all the related factors impacting behaviours. It encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect health”.
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