Water and Sanitation in Africa

Looking to the Future  In these past 10 weeks, I have examined the colonial legacies within the sector as well as the present landscape, which makes it fitting to finish by looking at the future of the WASH sector. Rather than taking a micro-level, humanistic perspective, this blog will take a step back, and look at the wider systems in place, and how these can be adapted to improve the future of the wash sector. I will be advocating a System Thinking Approach (STA).     Why A STA?  ( Adali, 2020 ) There is no doubt that WASH provision takes place in a complex system, relying on a network of people and actors to effectively provide sanitation ( Figure 1 ) . This therefore makes the challenge of adequate WASH facilities far more than building wash infrastructure. The provision of WASH infrastructure has been central to the past 3 decades of WASH interventions, as it is far easier than challenging some of the boarder systems in place, however, this has infrequently ach...

A critical evaluation of the Tippy Tap  Having read thesanitationstation's blog on the effectiveness of waterless toilets, and reading about a succession of  failed infrastructural projects, it inspired me to think about innovations which have emerged from African communities and are proving successful.  The importance of hand washing: Despite sufficient evidence that hand washing is, " The single most important intervention for preventing diarrhoeal and respiratory infections ", the rate of hand washing remains low in resource limited settings. In Uganda, diarrhoeal diseases are the fourth leading cause of child mortality , which is completely preventable, with adequate sanitation. This evidence suggests that hand washing is critical at the best of times, yet with the recent outbreak of the infectious COVID-19, hand washing has become even more important, with the WHO recommended increased hand washing to prevent transmission. Therefore, in this curr...

In my first blog, I mentioned how current discourse surrounding the  WASH sector is embedded in  colonial knowledge . The impact that colonialism has had, and continues to have on the WASH sector is something that I aim to explore further in this blog . I aim to draw these ideas together to pose the argument that Africa has had a western paradigm of ‘modernity’ imposed on it during colonialism which does not serve the needs of the local people, and in order to move forwards, African leaders and the West need to move away from this paradigm and find solutions which prioritise the needs to the local communities. During colonialism  During colonialism, the European empire generally refused to provide modern sanitation and water infrastructure in “native neighbourhoods,” instead used racial zoning and cordons sanitaires to segregate European neighbourhoods from epidemic disease .  Nilsson  ( 2017 ) gives an example of the French settlement Sain...