Setting the Sanitation Scene in Africa

What does it mean to you when I say “Water, Sanitation and Africa”? Indeed, if I were to ask you to do a word association, what would your next 3 words reveal about your lens of perspective? Would they inspire hope and optimism toward solutions, or reflect sympathy and frustration toward problems? Would they suggest a keen reliance on building sanitation hardware, or initiate a thoughtful questioning of the cultural softwares in need of updating? Would they make you read on, or decide to stop here?

Whatever your three words of association might be, it was my own answer – ‘opportunities being missed’ – that has prompted me to write the following blog exploring Water and Sanitation in the context of Africa.

Of course, I think it is understandable that my own response revealed a sentiment of 'missingness'. It only takes one quick google search of the statistics, using keywords such as UNICEF and UN, to fully appreciate the seriousness of the sanitation deficits still being witnessed throughout the world:

• 1/3 people don’t use improved sanitation (Unicef)
• 1/7 people practice open defecation (Unicef)
• 1/4 health-care facilities throughout the world lacked basic water services and 1/5 had no sanitation services (UN)
• 3 billion persons lacked soap and water at home (UN)

Reflecting on such shocking figures, it is hardly surprising that sanitation is targeted by the Sustainable Development Goals, which identify progress in water and sanitation as being a core necessity in the production of international peace and prosperity (UN).

In examining SDG 6 (Figure 1), however, it also becomes obvious that the task of achieving availability and sustainability for all is enormous. Doing so will depend on a complex multitude of actors and approaches that incorporate international cooperation, community development and environmental protection. 

Figure 1: Sustainable Development Goal 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

Where do I even begin to blog then? What can I justify as prioritising within the limited framework I have to explore this topic? Perhaps it is worth taking a step back to focus on answering two simple questions that contextualise the subsequent series of posts. 

1. What do I mean when I'm talking about sanitation?

As defined by the WHO, basic sanitation can be thought of as a “use of improved sanitation facilities that are not shared with other households… [where] improved sanitation facilities include flush or pour-flush toilets connected to piped sewer systems, septic tanks or pit latrines” (WHO). Certainly, this definition acts a good starting point for us, pinpointing various levels of infrastructures and noting the importance of privacy. 

But is it good enough? 

McFarlane et al’s (2014) work on the ‘Everyday Sanitation’ would suggest not, with the authors acknowledging the spatial and temporal variation inherent to sanitation practices. Here, it is important to realise that sanitation is not a homogenous concept, and the consequent implications of this will be fundamental for evaluating the relationships discovered in Africa. This leads nicely on to the second question.

2. Why Africa?

My initial interest of Africa emerges from the rapid urbanisation being experienced in the region and the subsequent ‘Paradox of Modernity’ that has emerged as a result. It is often cited that although more than half the world’s population live in urban areas, fewer people have access to a safe toilet (63%) than they do to a mobile phone (87%) (UN 2013). Africa certainly contributes to this, being home to some of the fastest urbanisation rates in the world, whilst having infrastructure capabilities that are struggling to keep up with growth. The consequences of such differential growth can be seen in the map I produced in Rstudio (Figure 2), using data from Unicef and the WHO. Seemingly, despite improvements between 1990 and 2015, there are still many nations within Sub-Saharan Africa where less than 40% of the population are using improved sanitation in urban areas. 

Figure 2: Use of improved sanitation facilities (%) in Africa

Author: Finbar Aherne, 2020 (Code in Appendix)

A second reason for exploring Africa is the issue of sanitation being an ‘Unmentionable’ topic in many communities. Indeed, as Thieme (2018) acknowledges, with reference to George (2008) in their discussion of ‘The IkoToilet’, sanitation is intrinsically linked to perceptions and experiences, which makes implementing successful interventions more complicated than simply introducing hardware. We must therefore respect the variation and complexities of sanitation, recognising, much like Jewitt (2011), that it has historically been the taboos of sanitation that have created the lack of attention necessary to create these spatial inequalities. 

Where have we landed?

Effective sanitation, however it might materialise, is a necessity for providing the basic human rights that you and I take for granted everyday. 

Africa, meanwhile, is a dynamic and evolving continent, where the foundations of sanitation and such rights are unevenly experienced and unevenly prioritized. 

Although a multitude of factors undoubtedly contribute to this unevenness, my contextualisation of this blog has highlighted how urbanisation and 'The Unmentionable', might provide two key avenues through which to explore the situation and solutions currently unfolding throughout the region.

Urbanisation is intriguing, bringing the rural-urban dichotomy to the forefront of intervention considerations, forcing us to think about how sanitation can be translated across spaces. The unmentionable is challenging, introducing deeply embedded cultural complexities that may force us to consider how sanitation might be re-approached through different perspectives. 

By being mindful of both, I hope that the journey of this blog will capture your attention and reveal some of the diverse challenges and solutions that are awaiting us! 

Appendix:

**To begin with, I installed and load the `rnaturalearth` package in R. This gives me access to the shapefile boundaries of every country on the planet and will be needed to merge the provided data with the country shapes. Knowing I would need additional mapping packages I loaded `tmap` and `sp`**

```{r}

library("rnaturalearth")

```

**Next I needed to subset the African nations into their own object**

```{r}

# Africa shapefile 

spdf_africa <- ne_countries(continent = 'africa', type = 'countries')

plot(spdf_africa)

```

**With the Africa Shapefile created, I loaded in the provided data on water and sanitation and created two objects that seperated the information for each country by the two years provided for each country - 1990 and 2015**

```{r}

# Load African Sanitation

Africa.U.San <- read.csv("watsan_who_2015_U_San.csv")

# Subset years

Africa.U.Sa.1990 <- subset(Africa.U.San, Year==1990)

Africa.U.Sa.2015 <- subset(Africa.U.San, Year==2015)

```

**Next I needed to merge the Africa shapefiles with the data, giving me a spatial polygon dataframe with the data linked to each country. Note - here I needed to run some code to make sure some of the data was being read as numerical, rather than as character strings. In other words, I needed to make sure R recognised them as numbers.**

```{r}

# make two shapefiles

Africa.U.Sa.1990.spdf <- merge(spdf_africa, Africa.U.Sa.1990, 

                               by.x="sovereignt", by.y="Countries.and.areas", 

                               duplicateGeoms = T, all.x = TRUE)

Africa.U.Sa.2015.spdf <- merge(spdf_africa, Africa.U.Sa.2015, 

                               by.x="sovereignt", by.y="Countries.and.areas", 

                               all.x = TRUE)

# Make numeric 

  # 1990

is.numeric(Africa.U.Sa.1990.spdf@data$Urban.Use.of.Improved.Sanitation.Facilities..)

Africa.U.Sa.1990.spdf@data$Urban.Use.of.Improved.Sanitation.Facilities.. <- as.numeric(Africa.U.Sa.1990.spdf@data$Urban.Use.of.Improved.Sanitation.Facilities..)

  # 2015

is.numeric(Africa.U.Sa.2015.spdf@data$Urban.Use.of.Improved.Sanitation.Facilities..)

Africa.U.Sa.2015.spdf@data$Urban.Use.of.Improved.Sanitation.Facilities.. <- as.numeric(Africa.U.Sa.2015.spdf@data$Urban.Use.of.Improved.Sanitation.Facilities..)

```

**The last thing to do was map my creation and add some arguments to the code to make it pretty :)**

```{r}

# MAP

par(mfrow=c(2,1))

  # 1990

tm_shape(Africa.U.Sa.1990.spdf) + tm_fill("Urban.Use.of.Improved.Sanitation.Facilities..", palette = "Spectral") +

  tm_layout(legend.outside=T, 

            title="Africa Urban Sanitation Use 1990") +

  tm_borders(col = "grey40", lwd = 1, lty = "solid", alpha = NA)

  # 2015

tm_shape(Africa.U.Sa.2015.spdf) + tm_fill("Urban.Use.of.Improved.Sanitation.Facilities..", palette = 'Spectral', ) +

  tm_layout(legend.outside = T, 

            title="Africa Urban Sanitation Use 2015") + 

  tm_borders(col = "grey40", lwd = 1, lty = "solid", alpha = NA) 

```