Water and sanitation in Africa.

Last week the Crown season four stormed Netflix with 29 million viewers. Besides the turbulent romance between Prince Charles and Diana, Thatcher's refusal to impose economic sanctions on South Africa's apartheid regime in 1986 was aired. It got me thinking about the severe effects the 60- year apartheid had on the marginalised South African population and the services provided to them.  For instance,  Enqvist and Zierhogel (2019:4) write that "during the oppression, black and mixed race communities were removed to the urban fringe, known as townships which lacked infrastructure and basic amenities" such as wastewater pipes. The removal was linked to sanitation discourses known as the 'sanitation syndrome,' (Swanson 1977)  as racial stereotypes of bad hygiene were said to threaten public health.  What did this cause? The land policy has caused long lasting urban segregation as the townships still exist today with an estimated 500,000 living in informal sett

After community management appeared to have failed, during the late 1980's and early 90's, the World Bank, IMF and other Western governments pushed for neo-liberal economic policies, such as supporting financial instruments for privatised delivery. It was promoted as a means to bring efficient business regulation into water service management, however, instead it has led to a reduction in access and a dramatic rise in price across the world, in which this blog will focus on South Africa.  The World Bank advised certain governments including South Africa to decrease their grants and subsidies to local councils  (Bond 2003) , which meant local governments and municipalities had no choice but to turn to commercialisation and privatisation of basic services such as water ( Bayliss 2013) . Then, they could enter into service and management partnerships with multinational water corporations which created a source of revenue no longer provided by the state (McDonald and Smith 2004). 

An example of a mechanism used in community management strategies is the hand pump which emerged in the 1980's; the decade of Village Level Operation and Maintenance ( VLOM ), mentioned last week. Handpumps allow access to boreholes and therefore seem very useful for rural communities. Furthermore, the aim was they could be fixed with only one tool and were easy to install and repair (Morgan 1993). However, the sustainability of hand pumps has been severely critiqued since one in three are thought to not be working at any one time ( Foster 2013) . Therefore, I felt very inclined to investigate. Research by Foster et al.,  (2018) has shown hand pumps act as an easy and cheap way to achieve a policy goal. It is therefore no surprise that there are the most widely-used technology for rural water supply in Africa and that 60,000 are installed each year ( Parry- Jones et al., 2001).  Figure 1, a diagram of a handpump. Source Mechanical Engineering 2016 However, cost efficiency doesn&#

 This blog will explore the history of the movement of Water, Sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services globally and focus on the input of community management approaches in rural areas. Decentralisation, the neoliberal framework to reduce the involvement of the state alongside the failures of under-resourced governments to deliver services to rural communities led to community management being adopted as the prevalent model for management of rural water and sanitation supplies in sub- Saharan Africa in the 1980's ( Parry-Jones et al., 2001 ). In a year of disliking Amazon , shopping locally, community management working from the ""bottom- up seems perfect?! However,  Africa has been referred to as "the graveyard of development projects" an attempt to meet development goals, institutions effectively implanted a one size fits all approach which this blog will show isn't effective  ( Cadribo 1994:22 in Doe and Khan 2004). Figure 1, ministries of health discussing

 In a previous post, I mentioned COVID-19 is thought to have spread in Sudan after the breakdown of sanitation caused by recent floods. When reading around the subject this week, I came across an article on the wastewater management, or in this case, the lack there of, which was also thought to be contributing to the transmission of the virus.  The paper by Liu, Thompson, Carducci and Bi (2020) , suggests the potential for a secondary transmission of COVID-19, via wastewater should be considered. They combine papers written around the world to make a strong argument for this which I don't think has been given enough attention in the media. As we are all aware, the primary process of transmission is through respiratory droplets and direct or indirect contact. However, COVID-19 (scientific name SARS-CoV-2) and its sequence have been identified in human faecal samples in Australia, China, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, USA and Turkey ( Liu et al., 2020) . For example, i

This year, the theme of World Toilet Day (WTD), an international campaign to help tackle the sanitation crisis is  sustainable sanitation and climate change . The theme highlights the effects of climate change on water access and the sanitation service chain which is a central challenge in Africa.  Firstly, climate change has caused annual rainfall and water availability to become less predictable ( Trentberth 2011 ), increasing the number of water-stressed regions which is a particular concern with the spatial and temporal variations of rainfall in Africa ( Damkjaer and Taylor 2016) . Furthermore, extreme weather events such as flash flooding are perpetuated which have increased across southern Africa dramatically since 1980 , shown in Figure 1.  WEF  considers these to be one of the most likely risks to food production over the next ten years. Figure 1,  shows the presence of climate related events in the last 30 years.   UNICEF 2020 How does this affect sanitation provision? The eve