Water and Sanitation in Africa

The challenges of Writing about Africa: For my first blog, I have chosen to convey some of the challenges that I have already encountered or anticipate encountering when it comes to writing about water and sanitation in Africa. I chose to write this as my first blog to hold myself accountable to the way in which I approach writing about water and sanitation in Africa throughout the course. It is only through listening and engaging to the lived reality of those without access to adequate sanitation that necessary, genuine knowledge can be created, on which solutions can be based. To do this, however, there is a need to overcome challenges of positionality, over-simplification and decolonising knowledge.    The first challenge that I have encountered is the complexity of the problem. Wainaina (2006) uses satire to emphasise that "Africa is not one country, it is a continent, made up of different countries, each with its own identity." Within these countries, within ci...