Addressing Water and Sanitation in Africa

  'The climate crisis is a water crisis'  A goal set for COP26 is to  work together to deliver and this will be the central idea for today's blog post. Population growth, urbanisation, climate change and governance issues are all reasons why much of the SSA population still lack access to clean water. In the following blog post, I will aim to highlight how governance plays a large role in why Africa may be behind in terms of water and sanitation than the rest of the World.  Why is reaching sustainability for water and sanitation difficult for Africa? There are more actors involved with the development of water and sanitation in SSA compared to the rest of the world. In SSA it is not just the private and public sectors who are involved with decisions concerning safe water but also NGOs, civil society, and international donors.  The facilities in SSA are more diverse including improved facilities like flushed toilets but also unimproved facilities such as hanging...

Meeting the SDG 6 mentioned in my previous blog post , may be a challenge for countries in Africa. Challenges faced by Kampala, the capital city of Uganda will be the focus of this blogpost. W ater supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) conditions in these environments are often unimproved due to regulation issues, low budgets and lack of capacity . Therefore, I will aim to explain the how pit latrines work, then depict the challenges present with them and finally propose ideas and suggestions on how to combat the challenges present.  Approximately 90% of households in Kampala use on-site sanitation facilities and primarily pit latrines. However, Kampala is not alone as many low-income countries chose pit latrines as their most common disposal of faecal waste in aims to reach targets of SDG 6. Graham and Polizzotto suggest that 1.77 billion people use pit latrines as a primary means of sanitation. How do pit latrines work? Excreta falls into a hole in the ground. Then, through ba...

Safe drinking water is inaccessible to 1 in 3 people  across the globe 2.2 billion people don't have access to safely managed drinking water facilities  We take for granted that the water we receive out of our taps is safe to drink. However, this isn’t the case for a large proportion of Africa where access to safe drinking water is negligent or unimproved. Although there have been efforts to increase safe drinking water within the African continent the progress seems to be slow and therefore this blog will aim to raise awareness of the issues involving access to safe drinking water from a sanitation perspective and shed light on the importance of educating people on the issues of water and sanitation. First, we must analyse the dire consequences of what the lack of sanitation can lead to including but not limited to - diarrhoea, cholera and death. Below in figure 1, the largest share of deaths from unsafe water resources originate largely in the continent of Africa, specific...