7. The Need to ‘WASH’ Away Sanitation Issues
In this post I want to reflect on the lecture on sanitation (which mainly only focuses on sanitation trends in Sub-Saharan Africa) and apply it to the context of increasingly urbanized Sahelian cities. The biggest trends forecasted in the Sahel that must be closely looked at is the unprecedented population growth that is to occur for the rest of the century. In the next 20 years, the G5 Sahel countries are expected to double from 80 from 80 to 160 million inhabitants by 2040 (Pradelle, 2019). What this implies for a region already dogged by famine and conflict is that there will be greater stress on urban areas and fierce competition for resources. As urbanization is proliferating, Sahelian countries are witnessing a transformation of lifestyles in urbanized towns with greater emphasis on consumption, transport, access to services, etc.
There is extreme stress on governments to provide for and to equip cities to handle increasing pressures. Keeping in mind the Sahel’s battle with water scarcity, another aspect that needs to be addressed in tandem but has increasingly been neglected is sanitation and hygiene, known collectively as WASH (acronym for water, sanitation, and hygiene). Like the lecture in class, much of the up-to-date literature on WASH in urban areas are concentrated in cities in Sub-Saharan Africa and barely focus on places in the Sahel. However, there is enough research to indicate that the WASH situation across several countries is poor. Two G5 countries, Burkina Faso and Niger, have one of the lowest rates of access to safe water and sanitation in the world evidenced by being in the bottom 10 of the sanitation and drinking water category of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI, 2020). Nearly 68% of Nigerien population practices open defecation because of poor WASH practices and a lack of sanitation facilities (UNICEF, 2020). In Burkina Faso, absence of a effective disease prevention strategy has resulted in an alarming incidence of water-related diseases that continues to weaken people’s health (Veolia Foundation, 2012).
The first reason for a poor WASH situation is the lack of integrated urban planning by the national government and local authorities to develop and maintain many sanitation infrastructures. Using Sudan as an example, many large cities throughout Sudan struggle to tackle water pollution issues by galvanizing industries, communities, and civil society to work collectively. The government does not support the coordination on WASH between various ministries on irrigation, agriculture, health, urban planning, etc. For industries, there is a lack of enforceable legislation, low fines for polluters, and willingness to spend money on treating waste discharge properly. Other project and policy constraints include a lack of professional and technical manpower to implement projects, an absence of policies for water development to support these WASH projects, and financial impediments due to lack of funds or delays in allocating funds for irrigation and drainage projects. Overall, there needs to be adequate institutional and legal frameworks involved across the entire WASH sector (Omer, 2002).
Another reason for poor WASH in some states in the Sahel is due to the heavy politicization of access to sanitation within local communities. There is still a pervasive undertone that affected communities and individuals are passive actors in development. In Northern Senegal, the transfer of responsibility to the local population as a result of decentralization processes has resulted in poor management of water infrastructures. Due to intense decentralization throughout Senegal, specialized borehole committees, under the administrative supervision of the Ministry of Waterworks, were formed distinct from the local authorities of each village. The decentralization process left these committees quite powerless, limited to playing a technical role in operating and maintaing borehole equipment while the state continues to hold ownership of the boreholes and regulates access to the watering facilities. As a result, misappropriation of funds happens often and when pumps break down, they are not repaired for a long time. Since the pumps are owned by the state, the local community is hesitant to pay for the repair and maintenance fees because they feel it to be the responsibility of the state to do so (Benjaminsen and Lund, 2001). In some areas where the well committees are seen as vital institutions, another set of local politics occurrs that hinders the proper management of water facilities. Resources like water and land are often not just for survival and to improve quality of life, but utilized for power and control or to define personal and social identities (Shipton and Goheen, 1992). There are contestations over the seats in the well committee, where representatives of different, local political factions will try to gain power over the committees to further their own interests. Local elites engage in power struggles amongst one another in this way to gather support for their own political careers because controlling a well is seen as a symbol of high status (Juul, 2001).
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