The Implications of Rapid Urbanisation in Sub-Saharan Africa

The main purpose of this post is to identify and explain the rationale behind the patterns of access to safe water and sanitation facilities in various urban regions throughout Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), mainly taking into account the implications of rapid urbanisation.

Rapid urbanisation in SSA has been viewed by some observers as a phenomenon which provides urban spaces with the stimulant they need to grow. Indeed, it is undeniable that urbanisation provides the conditions conducive to economic and infrastructural expansion, as economic activity takes a step away from the agricultural-type described in Rostow’s "Traditional Society" to become more advanced and lucrative.

In reality, ‘virtually no country has graduated to a high-income status without urbanizing, and urbanization rates above 70 percent are typically found in high-income countries’ (World Bank’s 2013 Global Monitoring Report). Thus, longstanding principles of economic and development progression have regarded urbanisation as a fundamental aspect of economic growth in the developing world.

However, for all the economic and development advances that reside from rapid urbanisation in SSA, the region’s urban population has been subject to sizeable drawbacks. For all its advantages, rapid urbanisation in SSA inflicts a significant challenge for the development of improved safe water supply sources and sanitation facilities. This is to the extent that countless urban regions across SSA are failing to meet basic infrastructural needs in regard to safe water and waste disposal, for example (UNISDR).

As I alluded to in the first post of this series, the rapid growth of urban areas has amplified the demand for access to safe water and sanitation facilities to the extent that population growth in urban SSA is increasing the tension between the population’s growing needs and what the planet can actually provide. This resonates with the opinion of Joan Clos, the Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, who said:

Africa is the fastest urbanizing continent on the planet and the demand for water and sanitation is outstripping supply in cities.

There are many reasons for this negative relationship, most of which revolve around the increasing tension put on facilities by a growing population. Despite the fact that since the mid-1990s urban access to a safe water supply has expanded, albeit slowly, efforts to increase the SSA population’s access to an improved water supply have not been sufficient to cope with such high levels of population growth (World Bank, 2011). As alluded to by Baye et al. (2012), water supply systems and sanitation facilities have failed to meet the needs of consumers as they are continuously confronted with problems of under- and over-use, negligent maintenance and insufficient ‘cost recovery.’

The process of rapid urbanisation is seen by some observers as a largely unwelcome source of more problems in regard to access to safe water and sanitation facilities. The development of improved water supply facilities in nations with high growth rates among urban populations is often seen to be trailing behind urban population growth. For this reason, an increasing number of the urban population in SSA are turning to unimproved sources of drinking water, including wells, boreholes and vendors. In fact, dependence on wells and boreholes in urban regions with high population growth rates grew from 25 to 27 percent between the late 90s and the late 2000s (World Bank, 2011).

This may come as a revelation since the number of individuals with access to piped water has increased dramatically over the past 10 years (see Graph 1).

Graph showing urban population served with piped water. Source: WHO/UNICEF (2015)

However, there is a simple explanation for why so many urban dwellers are having to turn to unimproved sources of drinking water. The issue is one of distribution, not volume; the development of piped water services in urban spaces in SSA has been uneven. The current tariff arrangements benefit the wealthiest in society. For example, in Accra, Ghana’s capital city, 80 percent of the affluent communities have access to the piped public supply, whereas only 16 percent do in less well-to-do areas (World Bank, 2011).

Urban population growth has too overtaken the rate of improved sanitation in SSA, leaving a greater number of the population dependent on unimproved forms of sanitation. Countries with high population growth rates among their urban regions tend to have a comparatively lower proportion of their population with access to improved sanitation. This is evidenced by Carolina Dominguez Torres, as she writes for the World Bank:

In the late 2000’s, on average 52 percent of the urban population in these countries had access to improved sanitation, compared to 67 and 71 percent in countries with medium and low urban population growth rates, respectively.

The need for improved sanitation facilities in Ethiopia, for example, is stark, as a mere 21 percent of the population has access to satisfactory sanitation facilities. In Ethiopia, the majority of the population, mostly the deprived urban dwellers, are subsisting in contaminated environments, unprotected from sanitation and water-related diseases. In fact, more than 88 percent of the population in urban slums are forced to use unimproved sanitation services (Beyene et al., 2015).

This post has aimed to explore the state of access to safe water and sanitation facilities in SSA, using various examples of spaces which are experiencing rapid urbanisation. By identifying the various patterns of access in SSA, it is possible to begin to comprehend how far management strategies still have to go to meet various goals. The next blog in this series of posts will take a look into a specific example of a current system of water provision in an urban setting within Africa, and go on to analyse its effectiveness.

Development in Practice: Alternatives to Top-Down Solutions

The water landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is characterised by inconsistencies within and between nations. For instance, some nations were much closer than others to achieving the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7.C, which was 'to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.' In this post, I present a brief overview of the history of development practice in urban SSA by looking into the evolution of water practices and policies.

MDG 7.C. Source: United Nations

Historically, development practice across SSA has been predominately “top-down” (Gould, 1993). There has been a longstanding notion that practices of development in the West can be exported to other territories; a notion that characterises the rest of the world as “the other” – an idea which stems from Edward Said with Orientalism (1978). However, this approach to development has been highly criticised by scholarship. Perera and Tang (2013), for instance, have condemned the United Nations for adopting a “one size fits all” approach in their efforts to theorise the world’s cities and their problems.

Development has thus become a highly contested term (Willis, 2005). In the last couple of decades, academics, politicians, economists, and the like, have begun to realise the problems of top-down approaches and that “bottom-up” solutions are preferable in many contexts. These bottom-up approaches are characterised by participation, indigenous knowledge, and the empowerment of marginalised individuals (Briggs, 2005). By giving power to local actors and making them more involved in the design of policy and schemes that directly affect them, bottom-up approaches to development are increasingly being recognised as an adequate alternative to more traditional top-down approaches (Crescenzi and Rodríguez-Pose, 2011).

In the case of water and sanitation, bottom-up approaches have had some success among SSA nations in recent years. Drawing upon research from Dill (2009), it is possible to discover an example of bottom-up water governance in the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which serves as evidence to suggest bottom-up development solutions are often more appropriate and effective than their top-down alternatives.

The situation of access to safe water and sanitation services in Dar es Salaam is problematic to the extent that ‘among the many challenges confronting Dar es Salaam’s residential areas, lack of access to improved water sources is arguably the most enduring, problematic and important’ (Dill and Crow, 2014). Across Dar es Salaam, urban residents are beginning to adopt greater responsibility for the provision of safe water and sanitation facilities through a range of ‘government-community partnerships’ (Dill, 2009). Such schemes are thought to be fundamental to make sure provision is effective, competent, sustainable, nondiscriminatory, and appropriate for the needs of urban residents.

This post has provided a brief overview of the history of development practice in urban SSA by looking into the evolution of water practices and policies. It has introduced the notion of bottom-up approaches to development as an alternative to more traditional top-down approaches. The next post will take a look into the implications of rapid urbanisation in urban areas within SSA.

Access in Africa

Welcome to the first post in a blog concerning access to safe water and sanitation in urban Africa.

Most of us will probably agree the positive contributions to welfare made by safe water and sanitation cannot be overstated. It is a universal need (Baye et al., 2012) and nothing short of a basic human right (UN 2010). However, many countries around the world have found themselves in quite the predicament, as decades of national and international interventions have failed to overcome the barriers to improved conditions.

The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the framework that has played a key part in improving the lives of the world's poorest people – challenged the international community to 'halve the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.' Yet, as the MDG era has come to a close, it is possible to see how far we still have to go. Despite the UN suggestion that more than 90 percent of the world’s population now has access to improved sources of safe and secure water, we have fallen short in meeting the sanitation goal, as 2.4 billion people are still without access to improved sanitation facilities.

In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), access to clean water and sanitation services is notoriously insufficient. Throughout the region, 319 million people do not have access to improved drinking water and 695 million people lack improved sanitation facilities (WHO, 2015). Moreover, approximately one out of every five deaths in children under the age of 5 years is attributable to a water-related disease (WHO/UNICEF 2009).

Many of the problems relating to access in SSA are exaggerated in urban regions and in cities, especially. African cities are said to be the fastest growing cities in the world. According to The World Bank, cities in SSA are growing at a rate of 4.2% per year.

Graph showing population growth. Source: The World Bank

The rapid growth of urban areas has amplified the demand for access to safe water and sanitation facilities. Thus, population growth in urban Africa increases the tension between our growing needs and what the planet can actually provide.

In the posts that will follow in the coming months, I hope to explore the implications of rapid urbanisation on access to safe water and basic sanitation in urban SSA, and identify the management strategies which could jointly form a unified approach to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6. Furthermore, I will consider whether disparities between SSA and more developed regions across the world are going to widen, or whether this age of rapid urbanisation can bring with it solutions and opportunities.

The next blog in this series of posts will take a look into the history of development practice in urban SSA by exploring development in practice.