Sanitation as a business in Malawi – the poor will have to wait

Malawian sanitation entrepreneur Martius using “The Gulper” to empty a pit latrine. Photo: Water for People

Providing toilets to the poorest may be “dear to the hearts of many non-profits, aid agencies and governments” but if you want to involve business you have to start with the better-off families first. So says business woman and sanitation entrepreneur Towera Jalakari who runs a pit emptying service in Blantyre, Malawi.

“We will get to Everyone in Blantyre one day, but the only way to make sure Blantyre actually solves its sanitation problems is to recognize that the market must function.  [...]  As we get better, as we scale city-wide, then costs will come down, services will improve, and pressure will build for all people to have a toilet.  We will get to the poorest, but they are not our first targets.  [...] If we rush too fast [...] then the poor will not have lasting services but rather a lot of useless toilets and nowhere to go to the bathroom.”

Malawi is one the countries in Water for People’s Sanitation as a Business program (2010-2014), which is funded by a US$ 5.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Water for People has contracted Tools for Enterprise & Education Consultants (TEECs) to support pit emptying businesses in Lilongwe and Blantyre.

Rwanda, Kigali: more connections to sewerage system planned

Kigali Eco-Toilet. Photo: Eugene Dusingizumuremyi / SuSanA

The capital city of Rwanda has turned a delay in funding into an opportunity to revise its plans so that more areas get connected to a new centralised sewerage system. Construction of a US$ 70 million wastewater treatment plant in Giti Cyinyoni, Nyarugenge District, was due to start in 2012 but has been delayed by one year.

The lack of a centralised sewage system in Kigali (pop. 1 million) has been forcing real estate developers to provide onsite sewerage systems for new housing units. Schools, hospitals and other public buildings are already required by law to have their own sewerage systems. In future all these onsite systems will be connected to the new centralised system.

In 2008, according to a survey, 80% of the people in Kigali still used pit latrines [1]. These have proved to be not only hard to maintain, but also expensive to manage in the long run. That’s why the city council recently passed a bylaw that instructs developers to install flush toilets connected to septic tanks.

[1] Hohne, A., 2011. State and drivers of change of Kigali’s sanitation : a demand perspective : paper presented at the East Africa practioners workshop on pro-poor urban sanitation and hygiene, Laico Umbano Hotel, Kigali, Rwanda, March 29th – 31st 2011 . [online] The Hague, The Netherlands: IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. Available at: <http://www.irc.nl/page/64586>

Related website: Kigali City – Water and Sanitation Programmes

Source:

• Susan Babijja, City Council reviews sewage management plan, New Times, 26 Oct 2012
• Rwanda: Kigali sewage system delayed by funds, Rwanda Express /  allAfrica.com, 14 Jun 2012
• Eric Didier Karinganire, Sewage in Kigali still an issue of concern, Rwanda Focus, 09 Apr 2012

Mozambique – Effectiveness of Large Scale Water and Sanitation Interventions

Effectiveness of Large Scale Water and Sanitation Interventions: the One Million Initiative in Mozambique, October 2011.

• Full-text (pdf)

Chris Elbers, et al.

The One Million Initiative of the Government of Mozambique aims at supplying access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation for one million people. The program has constructed hundreds of new boreholes and implemented trainings on sanitation in communities from three provinces. To evaluate the program, a panel survey design was set up with a baseline in 2008, a midterm in 2010 and an end-line in 2013. The survey covers interviews with 1600 households, focus group discussions about the community and water points in 80 clusters in 9 districts. To our knowledge this is the first rigorous evaluation of such a large scale program in the water and sanitation sector.

This paper summarizes the findings of the baseline and midterm surveys in terms of health impacts, latrine ownership and the use of improved water sources. Our results indicate that the water point intervention had a sizeable impact on the use of improved water sources and on the health outcome of children under 5 but no impact for older individuals, while the sanitation component of the program had a strong impact on latrine ownership and health outcome for older individuals, and a limited impact on hand-washing with soap and the use of improved water sources when it was available in the community

South Africa, KwaZulu-Natal: factory workers denied proper sanitation

Workers in many clothing and textile factories in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal are denied proper sanitation facilities, a trade union survey has found.

Workers were not supplied with toilet paper and being forced to use pieces of fabric, SA Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (SACTWU) secretary Chris Gina said. [...].

“Workers are expected to place these fabric off-cuts in bags or boxes next to the toilet… which are often only removed once a week, resulting in filthy, smelly, and unhygienic conditions,” he said in a statement.

“At almost all companies that we surveyed workers are not supplied with toilet paper.”

Factories that did supply toilet paper, made workers pay for it and deducted the costs from their weekly wages.

SaniFaso: a learning sanitation project in Burkina Faso

The SaniFaso project aims to eradicate open defecation in 12 partnering communes (the lowest level of administrative division) in Burkina Faso.

The four-year rural sanitation project, which started in December 2010, will  construct 16,000 latrines, train local masons and carry out hygiene promotion campaigns.

The European Commission is co-funding this 3 million Euro project. The implementing agencies are the French NGO Eau-Vive, in association with WaterAid Burkina Faso, Helvetas, GIZ/PEA and IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre.

During AfricaSan 3 conference in July 2011, SaniFaso released a project video explaining why and how it is a learning project.

For more about SaniFaso see

• an article IRC’s role in the project at www.irc.nl/page/62023
• a Powerpoint presentation and a project profile (both in French)

Eastern Africa drought: seven million people in need of WASH services

Seven million people, including over 700,000 refugees are in need of waster, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services according to a United Nations report of 15 July 2011.

The drought affecting Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti is being called the worst in 50 years. UN agencies have asked for US$ 1.6 billion to pay for essential programmes in the Horn of Africa, but have only received half that amount so far.

Water trucking is still needed in the driest areas as natural water points failed to refill sufficiently. Two million people have been given better access to safe drinking water so far in 2011.

Paradoxically, some areas in Ethiopia and Somalia are expected to receive above-normal rainfall in the June to September period. This is likely to increase the risk of flooding and subsequent outbreaks of waterborne diseases.

The Toilet Named Nigeria

In his latest column, government critic and Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity College (USA) Okey Ndibe, voices his disgust at the practice of open defecation in his homeland Nigeria.

If you want to gauge how badly Nigerians have been animalized, then pay attention to how, and where, many of them defecate. Just recently, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that 33 million Nigerians have no access to decent toilets. As a consequence, said the report, these citizens of Africa’s most populous nation answer the call of nature in the open.

Is it really only 33 million Nigerians? One is afraid that here’s one occasion when statisticians have pegged the figure too low. Nigeria – as I wrote three years ago – may be described as one vast toilet. Anybody who has traveled from Lagos to Onitsha by road knows that there isn’t one single rest area with toilet facilities along the route. At stops in Ore or Benin City, pressed passengers must hurry off into the brushes, gingerly skating around others’ feces, in order to relieve themselves.

South Africa: call to cancel US$ 82 million sanitation contract

A parliamentary committee wants to cancel a 550 million Rand (US$ 81.7 million) rural sanitation contract with an NGO for its failure to deliver services on time. The ministers of Public Works and of Human Settlements want to give the NGO, Independent Development Trust, a second chance.

The parliament’s human settlements portfolio committee wants to cancel the second and third phases of the Trust’s contract to build pit and flushing toilets in 25 rural municipalities. The Independent Development Trust was to have completed the first phase of its three-year contract, worth 100 million Rand (US$ 14.8 million) in April 2011, but it only spent 46 million Rand ((US$ 6.8 million) on 8368 pit toilets – a third of which were delivered after the deadline.

The committee plans to table a report in parliament calling for Public Works Minister Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde to cancel the rest of the contract. Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale pleaded with the committee to give the development trust more time and not to hand the contract over to the private sector.

However, MPs told Sexwale that they had been trying for 10 months to get the trust to deliver and tender documents indicated that it had no experience in sanitation and should not have been given the contract..

Source: Anna Majavu, Times Live, 27 Jun 2011

South Africa: landmark ruling on right to sanitation ends Cape Town “toilet wars”

With a high court ruling supporting South Africa’s constitutional right to sanitation, Cape Town’s “brutal – and farcical – toilet wars” have come to an end. Protesters from the Makhaza neighbourhood of the black township Khalelitsha, that was at the centre of the dispute, greeted the court decision with cheers.

Activists queue outside the Cape Town mayor Dan Plato's office on Freedom Day, 27 April 2011 to demand better access to basic sanitation in Khayelitsha and other informal settlements. Photo: Nardus Engelbrecht / Sapa

On 29 April 2011, the Western Cape High Court ruled that the city government must build enclosures around government-provided toilets in Makhaza, ending a two-year dispute that had become a heated political issue between the country’s two largest political parties.

It might seem like a small matter, but with local elections planned for May 18 [2011] across the country, the court decision is likely to become a matter of national political discussion, if not significance. Cape Town is run by South Africa’s second-largest political party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), an opponent of the ruling African National Congress (ANC)

Kenya: cooking on biogas from toilets in Kibera

The dire sanitation systems available to the hundreds of thousands living in the Nairobi slum of Kibera, often called Africa’s biggest slum, has been well-documented. Less talked about is the challenge of household energy for the urban poor. The Katwekera Tosha Bio Centre, operated by the Umande Trust, goes well beyond solving sanitation problems; it is a model for green energy, a meeting place for locals, and turning a profit for its operators.

The Umande Trust is a rights-based agency which believes that modest resources, strategically invested in support of community-led initiatives, can significantly improve access to water and sanitation for all,” says Paul Muchire, the Trust’s communication manager. This mission statement has guided the Trust towards partnerships with community-based organisations to improve the living conditions of people in places like Kibera.

The Trust first set out to build toilets and bathrooms, but had a larger vision: TOSHA, “Total Sanitation and Hygiene Access”, was born. The centre has toilets and bathrooms on the ground floor – the toilets are connected to a bio-digester, with a dome-shaped holding tank in which biogas is produced. Raw human waste from the toilets flows in, and bacteria break it down, releasing methane gas which collects at the top of the domed tank. The gas is piped to collective stoves one floor up – and is usually sufficient for community members to cook on throughout the day. They pay a small fixed fee for using the stoves.

From a business perspective, the profits from these centres are also significant. Katwekera Tosha makes a monthly profit of between 350 and 650 dollars. This money benefits the residents who have registered with the community-based organisation.

Source: Portal to Africa.com, 29 March 2011