Continental roadmap to address Africa’s wastewater crisis

Miriam Mannak

By GRID-Arendal

May 28^th, 2019

Africa’s wastewater and sanitation crisis is deep-seated and highly complex. However, if governments, academia, civil society and businesses get actively involved, the crisis is not insurmountable. This is one of the key conclusions of the Africa Sanitation and Wastewater Management Atlas, a first-of- its- kind multi-stakeholder roadmap of Africa’s wastewater and sanitation bottlenecks, solutions and investment opportunities due to be released later this year.

When looking at wastewater and sanitation provision in Africa, progress over the past two decades has been patchy. According to the United Nations’ 2019 World Water Development Report people living in Sub-Saharan Africa have lower access to safe drinking water than their counterparts in North Africa, where the ratio of access is around 80%. In addition, 76% of North Africans have access to basic hand-washing facilities comprising soap and water, compared to 15% of their counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa.

Sheer disparities exist between regions, but also within countries. In South Africa, Africa’s second-largest economy, despite the increase in the percentage of South Africans with access to improved sanitation services from 62% in 2002 to 82.2% in 2017, two million people still do not have access to toilets.

Continental roadmap to address Africa’s wastewater crisis

First-of-its-kind sanitation roadmap

The sanitation challenges may be enormous, yet according to GRID-Arendal’s Elaine Baker, the challenges are not impossible to solve. Many of these problems are about changing human behavior, not about building fancy toilets and high-cost infrastructure. She says,

“One of the most effective interventions is hand washing. Better hand washing facilities can save 500,000 children in Africa alone.”

Baker, who is one of the authors of the Atlas, explains that finding solutions to help Africa meet the 6th Sustainable Development Goal starts with improved collaboration between all stakeholders.

“The Africa Sanitation and Wastewater Management Atlas, a joint initiative by GRID-Arendal, the African Development Bank (AfDB), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that is currently being compiled, intends to play a facilitating role in this.”

The 9-chapter Atlas will be released later this year with the objective of sketching an accurate picture of the scope and scale of Africa’s wastewater and sanitation challenges, solutions and investment opportunities. She adds,

“There are individual studies about the links between wastewater and sanitation problems and various diseases, but no one has taken a comprehensive look at all the causes and implications of poor access to wastewater and sanitation in Africa.”

Economic cost of bad sanitation

The Atlas will serve as a guideline for policymakers and other stakeholders to drive change. Birguy Lamizana-Diallo, Programme Officer at the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Programme of Action (GPA), says:

"The Atlas is part of a dialogue, not an end-product. It will help us see the gaps and bottlenecks whilst giving us the input we need to change the way wastewater and sanitation services are delivered in Africa."

Poor access to toilets, hand washing facilities and clean drinking water is not just a humanitarian catastrophe that according to the World Health Organization (WHO) is claiming 115 African lives every hour. It also has severe economic consequences. In April this year, Ghana’s Minister of Sanitation and Water Resources, Cecilia Abena Dapaah, revealed that poor sanitation is costing the country USD 290 million per year. This equals USD 12 per person per year or 1.6% of Ghana’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Baker says,

“Not having proper toilet facilities makes people sick, lose work or die prematurely. There is a huge healthcare cost involved in terms of lost productivity. It is much cheaper to prevent the illnesses than to cure people. A functioning toilet doesn’t have to be expensive. It just needs to be maintained.”

Role of private sector

Solving Africa’s wastewater and sanitation problems isn’t a task reserved for governments. All stakeholders need to get involved, from academics and community leaders to the private sector. Businesses are, after all, also affected by water and sanitation problems, for instance, in the form of lost productivity due to employees who fall ill or worse.

According to Lamizana-Diallo, the Atlas intends to make a strong business case for investments in Africa’s water and sanitation sector. She explains,

“There are many wastewater and sanitation opportunities private companies can tap into, including the treatment, collection, and reuse of human waste.”

Riccardo Zennaro, Associate Programme Officer for Wastewater Management at UNEP’s GPA, agrees. Based in Kenya, he said he has come across many scalable and profitable ventures over the past few years.

“A great example is Sanivation. They collect faecal sludge from low-income households to produce bio-charcoal,”

he says, explaining the company installs mobile container-based toilets in low-income homes in Kenya free of charge. Sanivation then charges the toilet’s owner less than USD7 for a twice-a-week waste collection service.

After being sterilised with a solar concentrator, the sludge is dehydrated and turned into odourless biofuel briquettes. Since its founding in 2016, the venture has opened three bio-charcoal factories, the last of which serves 5,000 people and processes 1,000 tonnes of waste per month. Zennaro says,