Sanitation In Africa Research Articles

Access to basic drinking water and sanitation in Africa: Does financial inclusion matter?

Access to basic drinking water and sanitation in Africa: Does financial inclusion matter?

Access to water and sanitation in Africa: Does globalization matter?

Despite efforts to achieve universal access to safe drinkable water and improved sanitation, many Africans still lack access to these social services. There are also disparities between urban and rural areas in access to these services in Africa. If sustained, this adverse trend could undermine the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 6 to ensure access to safe drinkable water and sanitation for all by 2030. This paper examines the effect of globalization on access to clean water and improved sanitation in Africa over the 1990–2015 period. Based on the panel corrected standard errors estimator, the results show that overall globalization improves access to water and improved sanitation while increasing disparities between urban and rural areas in access to improved sanitation. Among the sub-indexes of globalization, social globalization enhances access to drinkable water and improved sanitation for the total, urban and rural population. However, social globalization widens the urban-rural gap in access to improved sanitation while its effect on disparities in access to drinkable water is not significant. Economic globalization reduces the share of the population with access to improved sanitation while its effects on access to drinkable water and the urban-rural disparities in access in both social services are not statistically significant. Finally, some differences are found when distinguishing between de facto and de jure aspects of globalization. Policy implications are discussed.

Pathway to equity in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in Africa: Ethical Implications

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Clean drinking water and sanitation have been recognized as essential to the realization of all human rights by the United Nations General Assembly on 28 July 2010, through Resolution 64/292. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, committed countries to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all by 2030.The 2018 Africa Sustainable Development Report finds that access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation remains very low in Africa by global standards, there are wide disparities between and within countries, and 43% of Africa’s rural population has access to basic drinking water services compared to 82% of the urban population. What kinds of ethical reasoning need to be considered in the pathway to equity in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in Africa within the context of growing population, industrialization, rapid urbanization and emerging challenges such as climate change, droughts, floods and mismanagement of waste water? What challenges and opportunities do the COVID-19 pandemic portends to the progress of availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation in Africa? How do we achieve the most good for the most people at the least cost? This talk will address these and the ethical dimensions of studies discussed in this session. METHODS: RESULTS: CONCLUSIONS: KEYWORDS: Ethics, water and sanitation, Africa

Linking natural resource dependence and access to water and sanitation in African countries

Links between natural resources and public goods are of growing interest, both for researchers and policy makers. Previous studies on this relationship have focused mainly on the monetary aspects of public goods rather than the quantitative aspects, such as the number of population with access to safe drinking water and sanitation, particularly in Africa. Yet from many perspectives, safe drinking water and sanitation are arguably more important for African populations. This paper therefore investigates the effect of natural resource dependence on access to water and sanitation in 44 African countries, with data covering the period 1995–2017. Using the two – step Generalised Method of Moments (GMM), this study shows the negative effect of total natural resource rents on access to water and sanitation, both for the total population and for urban and rural populations, respectively. A U-shaped relationship between natural resource rents and access to water and sanitation is also established. Furthermore, we show that natural resource dependence increases urban-rural gap in access to these services. Taking into account the type of natural resources, we show that while the oil rent and gas rent reduce access to these two services, the forest rent increases access to water and sanitation. Finally, the results show that democracy plays an important role in mitigating the negative impact of natural resources on access to water and sanitation in Africa. In a nutshell, democracy can be an effective way to break the resource curse in Africa.

Seroprevalence of Dromedary Camel HEV in Domestic and Imported Camels from Saudi Arabia.

Hepatitis E Virus (HEV) imposes a major health concern in areas with very poor sanitation in Africa and Asia. The pathogen is transmitted mainly through ingesting contaminated water or food, coming into contact with affected people, and blood transfusions. Very few reports including old reports are available on the prevalence of HEV in Saudi Arabia in humans and no reports exist on HEV prevalence in camels. Dromedary camel trade and farming are increasing in Saudi Arabia with importation occurring unidirectionally from Africa to Saudi Arabia. DcHEV transmission to humans has been reported in one case from the United Arab Emeritus (UAE). This instigated us to perform this investigation of the seroprevalence of HEV in imported and domestic camels in Saudi Arabia. Serum samples were collected from imported and domestic camels. DcHEV-Abs were detected in collected sera using ELISA. The prevalence of DcHEV in the collected samples was 23.1% with slightly lower prevalence in imported camels than domestic camels (22.4% vs. 25.4%, p value = 0.3). Gender was significantly associated with the prevalence of HEV in the collected camels (p value = 0.015) where males (31.6%) were more infected than females (13.4%). This study is the first study to investigate the prevalence of HEV in dromedary camels from Saudi Arabia. The high seroprevalence of DcHEV in dromedaries might indicate their role as a zoonotic reservoir for viral infection to humans. Future HEV seroprevalence studies in humans are needed to investigate the role of DcHEV in the Saudi human population.

Water in Nairobi: Unveiling inequalities and its causes

Water and Sanitation in Nairobi face problem common to many cities of the developing world which grow too fast. This situation allows the stark differences in socio-economic between the wealthy and the poor to translate into unequal and inequitable consumption of the available water. To try to promote development of Water and Sanitation in Africa, GWOPA (United Nations) and IFRA attempted to depict the inner urban inequities in terms of water consumption, water supply and water access. They used a hybrid methodology of remote-sensing classification, household survey and spatial analysis to map the variation of the operator’s performance inside the city of Nairobi. This study identifies different types of neighborhoods judging at how they look from space.

A system perspective in sanitation – Human waste from cradle to grave and reincarnation

Reaching the Millennium Development Goals for Sanitation is a challenge. Numerous technological innovations have been developed in the last decade but, with innovation comes an increasing lack of consistency and increased communication difficulties. This is especially true in rural and peri-urban West Africa, where there is a desperate need for feasible sanitation systems and technologies which, in the site specific context, can achieve the intended objectives of health, hygiene and well-being. Network for the development of Sustainable Approaches for Large-Scale Implementation of Sanitation in Africa (NETSSAF) has developed a method for organizing and defining sanitation systems. The main goal is to assist in the decision making process to avoid fixed mind sets towards conventional solutions which to-date, have not always shown to be the best choice in a site specific context. The systematization shall also help avoid that some waste components (e.g. greywater or faecal sludge from on-site technologies) are forgotten in the planning and master plan development.

The authenticity of ‘type two’ Multistakeholder partnerships for water and sanitation in Africa: When is a Stakeholder a partner?

This article is a study of the way in which two Type Two multistakeholder partnerships (TTPs) for water and sanitation in Africa – the UK-based Partnership for Water and Sanitation (PAWS) and the EU-based European Union Water Initiative (EUWI) – have interpreted the concepts of ‘stakeholder’ and ‘partnership’. First, after establishing our theoretical framework, we show how stakeholding and partnership are elements of the contemporary shift from government to governance, whereby responsibility for public decision-making is widened beyond politicians to include the private sector and civil society. Second, we analyse the meaning and implications of the concepts of ‘stakeholder’ and ‘partner’. Third, we apply this conceptual analysis to our two case studies – PAWS and the EUWI – and we find that in both TTPs, governments are the primary partners, while the private sector and civil society are the secondary stakeholders. We argue that in the case of PAWS, this two-tier structure is mainly unintentional, but in the case of the EUWI, it is partly strategic.

Financing the Millennium Development Goals for Water and Sanitation: What Will it Take?

The key financing challenge in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is to arrive at consensus-based, viable and sustainable country-level financing strategies that are integrated into the overall national planning and expenditure process. This requires an assessment of various policy scenarios taking into account economic capacity (as defined by GDP) as well as (plausible) level of public expenditures and affordability at a household level. This paper is prepared to guide the discussions on the characteristics of financing requirements, affordability and feasibility of the MDGs on water and sanitation in Africa. It argues that for African countries to meet the targets, they will need to implement cost recovery policies (leverage more resources into the sector) and use public resources better so as to increase sector performance and help the poor gain access to water and sanitation.

The Beat

The Beat

Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America

This paper has two principal aims: first, to unravel some of the arguments mobilized in the controversial privatization debate, and second, to review the scale and nature of private sector provision of water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arena and having been implemented in several countries in the South in the 1990s, privatization has achieved neither the scale nor benefits anticipated. In particular, the paper is pessimistic about the role that privatization can play in achieving the Millennium Development Goals of halving the number of people without access to water and sanitation by 2015. This is not because of some inherent contradiction between private profits and the public good, but because neither publicly nor privately operated utilities are well suited to serving the majority of low-income households with inadequate water and sanitation, and because many of the barriers to service provision in poor settlements can persist whether water and sanitation utilities are publicly or privately operated. This is not to say that well-governed localities should not choose to involve private companies in water and sanitation provision, but it does imply that there is no justification for international agencies and agreements to actively promote greater private sector participation on the grounds that it can significantly reduce deficiencies in water and sanitation services in the South.

Institutional Aspects of Water Supply and Sanitation in Africa

The provision of water supply and sanitation services requires a judicious balance of technological, organizational, managerial and legal measures. National policies should be spelled out and embodied in national sectoral planning, produced under the direction of a co‐ordinating central body. Implementation agencies should follow the plan and directives laid down by the sectoral plan. Planning criteria for programme and project assessment should emphasize the need to consider different alternatives for augmentation of available water supplies. Sectoral planning and organization of executing agencies must take into account the active participation and support of users. Operation and maintenance can be improved through appropriate monitoring, rehabilitation and special training. Adequate operation, maintenance and rehabilitation will reduce investment needs. Legal rules should be precise, flexible and objective‐orientated. Properly designed education campaigns are the most cost‐effective alternative for improving drinking‐water supply and sanitation programmes.

Factors Affecting the Implementation of Improved Sanitation in Africa*

Factors Affecting the Implementation of Improved Sanitation in Africa*