Water and sanitation in Africa.

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 efficien...

 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 examp...