Dying for a pee

Endlovisi, a vast sprawl of more than 6,600 corrugated iron shacks perched precariously over the sand dunes on the southeastern edge of Cape Town. One of the world's five biggest slumS, the townships of Khayelitsha stretch for miles, a sea of ramshackle wood and iron shacks. The townships are home to nearly 400,000 residents, 99 percent of them black. Part of Khayelitsha, Endlovisi is home to an estimated 20,000 people who share just 380 or so communal toilets.

"Using a toilet in informal settlements is one of the most dangerous activities for residents and women and the children have the biggest problems," said Axolile Notywala, of the Social Justice Coalition (SJO), a campaign group fighting for better sanitation in Cape Town's informal settlements. In 2012 a local man was convicted of multiple counts of child rape and one count of murder between April 2010 and September 2011. The court heard he had lured his victims to the bushes around the settlement before attacking them. The same court will begin a pre-trial hearing of the case against two cousins accused of the murder of Sinoxolo Mafevuka, a Khayelitsha teenager who was found strangled in a communal toilet near her home.

Meaning 'new home', Khayelitsha was established in the mid-1980s during the apartheid era as a vast dormitory for the thousands of workers who moved to Cape Town in search of jobs. When restrictions on the movement of blacks were lifted with the end of apartheid in 1994, hundreds of thousands more Xhosa people from the Eastern Cape poured into the city. Endlovini was born a few years later, in 1997, taking over a swathe of unoccupied hillside land that had been both a nature reserve and public landfill. The community's refusal to be evicted gave the place its name: in the Xhosa language it means both elephant and fierce strength and is officially known as Monwabisi Park.

Khayelitsha's residents' push for better sanitation and security, led by the SJC, has been built on tiny steps - from numbering existing toilets to identify them to the creation of services to clean and maintain them. Padlocks were issued to encourage a sense of ownership of existing toilets but new facilities are desperately needed.

"The city's budget for water and sanitation has decreased again this year...21 per cent of Cape Town's households are informal but they only get one percent of the city's total capital allocation for water and sanitation," the SJO's Notywala said. "The city still relies on offering undignified, inferior, temporary toilets meant for emergencies as long term solutions."

http://news.trust.org/item/20161012130244-psdu5/

Too much water - not enough water

Nigeria is one of Africa's leading economies, with its GDP second only to South Africa. The country has abundant natural resources such as gold, oil and natural gas and diamonds. Its economic growth, however, hasn't had the trickle-down effect. Basic living standards such as safe drinking water and sanitation are abysmal.

According to the NGO WaterAid, 63 million people lack access to safe drinking water and 111 million have no sanitation. 85,000 children die every year in the country from diarrhoea caused by unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation.

 Lagos' population has doubled to more than 21 million residents. According to estimates, this number is likely to rise to 35 million by 2025, making it the world's most populous city.

Makoko, a one-square-kilometre settlement of Lagos is sometimes called the "Venice of Africa". This 200-year-old slum is hovels built upon wooden stilts. There are no official census records, but estimates suggest the population totals 150,000. Residents here lack access to safe drinking water. When it rains, conditions turn particularly nasty, rain pushes sewage and waste through the slum, leaving behind a foul stench. Makoko lacks drainage and sanitation. Sewage from the slums flows straight into the surroundings, increasing the risk of infectious disease among inhabitants. Earlier this month there was an outbreak of cholera.Many of Makoko's inhabitants are from neighbouring Benin and Togo - most have lived here for decades. An average of eight people live in each house, and sustain themselves on fishing or collecting wood from the lagoon.

Theophilus Damijida is a general physician at the local health centre. "The health implications are vast. We encounter a lot of health problems as a result of no access to clean water," he said Patients coming here are diagnosed with diseases such as typhoid, malaria, diarrhoea and cholera. "It is all over as a result of no access to clean water. They believe this water is clean, they will even wash fresh wounds in it. The government has a big role to play so that there is more awareness to improve the situation and the people know the water they are using is not okay."

In July 2012, city authorities left thousands of people homeless after an eviction in one neighbourhood of Makoko. Since the area was considered an illegal settlement, they were given a 72-hour notice before their houses were destroyed. The government offered no rehabilitation or compensation. In an ever-growing city, where many wealthy desire waterfront property, there are suspicions the city wants the entire community gone.

Zambia's watered down election promise

United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that about 4.8 million of Zambia's 13 million people do not have access to safe drinking water. 6.6 million people are without access to proper sanitation. Drinking river water is not a safe practice and is fraught with danger and disease and is infested with black flies, which harbour a parasite known as nematode or roundworm. When these parasites are transmitted to a human they cause River Blindness and then there is bilharzia, a tropical disease that causes one’s skin to itch. Other symptoms include diarrhoea, fever, vomiting and blood in the urine.

The Patriotic Front was elected to government in September 2011 and in the election campaign, President Michael Sata’s PF promised to provide hand pumps and community latrines to those who lacked them. The party also promised that within 90 days of the new government’s taking office, people in rural areas would have access to safe drinking water. But now, almost nine months later but many wonder if the commitment to change the lives of those living in rural Zambia will ever materialise.

shitty Ghana

About 13,900 Ghanaian adults and 5,100 children under five years die each year from diarrhea.

Statistics also revealed that 4.63 million people in Ghana had no toilets and relieved themselves in the open while 16.34 million another used unsanitary or shared latrines. Ghana has a population of 24.3 million. With current sanitation coverage of 14 per cent, experts say it would be difficult for the country to meet the Millennium Development Goal on sanitation, which has a target of 54 per cent.

http://www.theafricareport.com/index.php/20120229501806154/society-and-culture/poor-sanitation-costing-ghana-hundreds-of-millions-501806154.html

It won't wash

It will take two centuries for sub-Saharan Africa to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, according to NGO WaterAid.

“Diarrhoea, 90 percent of which is attributable to inadequate sanitation and dirty water, is the single biggest killer of children in Africa, and yet sanitation targets are off-track,” Tom Slaymaker, one of the report’s authors.

Every day, 2,000 children die from diarrhoea in sub-Saharan Africa. Four out of 10 people do not have access to safe water, while seven out of 10 do not have appropriate sanitation facilities.

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) are being sidelined as governments concentrate on health and education. It is not a sexy topic - politicians much prefer to say they're opening a hospital or school, rather than building some toilets.

In Ethiopia, 193,000 deaths per year are WASH-related, and 71.4 million people have no access to sanitation facilities. Similar figures apply to Mali, Niger, Benin, Ghana and Congo, where 194,000 deaths a year are WASH-related and 49.5 million people have no access to sanitation facilities.

According to WaterAid, the Côte d'Ivoire administration targeted 0.06 percent of its GDP to water and sanitation, Ghana spent 0.29 percent, Liberia 0.28 percent, Madagascar 0.28 percent, Nigeria 0.18 percent, Uganda 0.41 percent and Zambia 0.56 percent. African governments need to commit at least 3.5 percent of GDP to sanitation and water to get back on track,

Over one billion people will miss the global MDG sanitation target if things continue unchanged In Asia, India will not reach its MDG on sanitation before 2047, while Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal will not achieve the target before 2028.

For Ourselves

The deadline for the world to meet its millennium development goals is now only four years away, yet in sub-Saharan Africa, there are still 570 million people without adequate sanitation, and it will be another 200 years before just half of the population of this region have access to a safe, private toilet. In Nigeria sanitation coverage stands at just 32%. Children die at the rate of 4,000 a day. That's the equivalent of one child dying in the time it takes to read this paragraph. Building a latrine is only half the battle.

In many rural areas in west Africa, the practice of open-air defecation is ritualised and bound in tradition. Beyond individual differences, the members of a group or society are united by similar ways of thinking and behaving, and will react to situations in similar ways. Our research showed that reasons for resistance to using a latrine included beliefs that one might be possessed by demons, lose magical powers or live a shorter life. Some believe a toilet is meant only for wealthy people or that, if somebody feeds you, you should in turn defecate in their field. For many in so-called modern cultures who take the use of a safe, private toilet for granted, these reasons may sound funny, even ridiculous. However, it soon becomes sobering to think that each of these beliefs may be directly linked to disease, debilitation and death.

An approach known as community-led total sanitation (CLTS) was first conceived in Bangladesh and the concept has been sweeping across south Asia with impressive results, and many are hoping that it can bring similar results to Africa. It is based on an understanding that the people themselves have the solutions and are best able to determine which interventions will enable them to attain a self-defined, collective destiny.

Instead of focusing on the supply and installation of sanitation hardware to communities, CLTS focuses on changing attitudes and behaviour through community mobilisation to stop open defecation, and to build and use latrines. Participants have reported that they find the approach engaging, participatory and, most notably, empowering – putting them in control of their own destiny, in a context in which, more often than not, death by disease is accepted with fatalistic submission to the 'will of God' or the hex of an enemy or the local witch. Empowering local communities – especially women – with information that allows them to make decisions pertaining to their health and well-being ensures that they "own" the desired change. It is they who can be credited for the health benefits of safe sanitation and hygiene practices. It is they who commit to the necessary behaviour change, they who hold themselves and their peers accountable.

Help is not coming from outside, but from within - and people are in charge of their own destiny.

TAKEN FROM HERE

water rights

At present, there are 2.6 billion people living without safe sanitation, which means countless communities where people are exposed to their own and others’ faeces. Excreta is then transmitted between people by flies or fingers and also finds its way into water sources, resulting in a public health crisis.

In Africa, diarrhoea kills almost one in five children before their fifth birthday.

According to the 2009 census, an estimated one in five Kenyans uses the bush as a toilet - access to piped water covers only 38.4 percent of the urban population and 13.4 percent of rural residents. With Kenya’s population projected to grow by up to one million people per year, existing water and sanitation facilities will be stretched further. Rapid urbanization has meant more informal structures with little or no water and sanitation services are springing up. Slum conditions may make the settlements a breeding ground for tomorrow’s pathogens. Already, health problems such as malnutrition, diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid fever are common, especially when water is mixed with industrial and sewage effluent.

A "deadly financing gap"

Poor sanitation and bad hygiene cause the deaths of one in five Liberians, according to the World Health Organization.Diarrhoea kills 20 percent of children who die aged five or under in Liberia according an Oxfam report.

Three out of four Liberians have no access to safe drinking water and six out of seven cannot access sanitation facilities, such as toilets.

Water and sanitation receives less funding than health, education, transport, energy and agriculture, according to the global Annual Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking Water