Tackling Africa's urban sanitation taboo

Adriana explains: “The terms ‘reed’ and ‘cement’ city are particular to Mozambique, but we find similar terms in many other contexts, references to the ‘cane’ and ‘concrete’ city and so on. The pattern is always the same, revealing persistent inequalities in the access to adequate sanitation experienced by most women and men, girls and boys living in low income settlements.”  

“When you look at governmental and utilities plans in these places, there’s still an insistence on seeing the current sanitation situation as a ‘provisional’ development phase, while focusing the bulk of investments on grid-style ‘modern’ infrastructure. However, most of these cities are unlikely to have a major grid-based sewage system that serves their whole population in the foreseeable future.” 

“That means typically that 80% of sanitation official promises and investments go to serve 20% of the population. These funding asymmetries are critical – that's where the colonial legacy still persists today.” 

This bias means that low income communities are primarily left to meet their sanitation needs through off-grid latrine-based sanitation. Manual pit emptiers in these areas play a key role, enduring tough working conditions, while women and girls devote many hours of daily unpaid work, masked as care work to ensure that these sanitation facilities work.  

Changing the conversation, one word at a time 

To create more equitable sanitation, and make sanitation taboos and injustices visible, the OVERDUE project engaged with women and men as both users and providers of sanitation infrastructure. They helped to generate insights and change reflecting their needs, experiences, practices and aspirations. 

The team studied the language used to describe sanitation, and how different words and terms served to reinforce taboos. The OVERDUE project worked with different communities to create a series of glossaries highlighting linguistic reinforcement of sanitation’s deeply gendered injustices. 

Terms like ‘frogman’ are used colloquially, dehumanising and stigmatising the manual latrine emptiers whose work requires them to dive into the latrines and manually remove faecal sludge, often without any basic protective equipment like gloves.

Across the cities involved in the project, these manual latrine emptiers are often forced to rely on the usage of intoxicants before, during and after their shift to help them cope with the work they do. 

“We critically interrogated the different stories attached to those names and what they mean in popular language. In many cases, these terms carry a strong sense of stigma, associating those whose work sustain the sanitation lifeline across African cities with notions of dirtiness, impurity and disgust. ” 

Adriana and her team stepped outside of the official narratives about sanitation, as these conversations tend to be dominated by English, French or Portuguese-speaking voices. To create the inclusive dialogue necessary to better understand the situation, the OVERDUE team worked with local interpreters who helped them engage with the sanitation users and workers in each location. 

“Throughout the project, language emerged as a crucial issue. Questioning the “way to say it” also made it possible to problematise crucial sanitation issues. The production of a Wolof (the most widely spoken language in Senegal and much of West African subregion of Senegambia) sanitation glossary was critical in this respect, enabling us to link a decolonial and gender-sensitive approach to identify key terms related to sanitation, and their social and cultural roots, thus providing a deeper understanding of the role that language plays in reproducing, enforcing, and at points challenging, sanitation taboos.” 

Collaborative action through research 

Last but not least, a key objective of OVERDUE was to produce actionable knowledge that partner organisations could use to develop strategic interventions – finding ways to do things differently.

These approaches were built on a fresh understanding of who is holding the sanitation service chain together across African cities, and how. The actionable lessons from the project were co-developed by reevaluating situated sanitation experiences, practices and investments across the board. These ranged from large-scale infrastructural grid-expansion investments, through to incremental and ad-hoc practices (implemented both individually and collectively) as coping mechanisms by the urban poor. 

A range of strategic interventions were then designed and implemented by and in the partnered cities, including biodigesters and small-scale sewage recycling projects in schools (many of which can be explored via the OVERDUE website).  

By applying a gendered perspective, the OVERDUE project was able to better address intersecting inequalities that often leave female sanitation users and providers at even greater disadvantages. 

Public toilet rehabilitation offered considerable opportunities for improving sanitation experiences for many people – especially women and girls. 

“Some of the cities opted for rehabilitating public toilets from a gender perspective. This was important because a very large percentage of women and girls rely on public toilets in transport hubs and markets or on communal toilets in the neighbourhoods where they live.” 

"These public toilets are typically dilapidated. Across countries which are highly dependent on external aid, we’ve found a vicious cycle of ‘build/neglect/rebuild’ – an NGO comes in, builds public or communal toilet blocks and a few years later they’re completely unusable, often becoming sites of open defecation.” 

“As we targeted public and communal toilet rehabilitation, it was crucial to engage with gender sensitive design. We asked questions about different blocks for women and men. Should there be particular facilities for children and disabled people? Who should manage these toilets, how should the fees for that be paid? Who should be in charged of their management?” 

Facing taboos and changing mindsets

Many of the sanitation problems facing Africans in off-grid urban locations are partly a result of the idea that these arrangements are a temporary, unfortunate deviation from modern Western ideals of sanitation.

Adriana sees this misunderstanding as a symptom of a wider mindset problem that reaches far beyond Africa. 

“This is a transplanted notion...the idea that somehow the same sort of sanitary revolution that took place in countries like the UK will eventually deliver universal adequate sanitation across urban Africa.”  

“When you look at that sanitation revolution – ensuring the flow of faecal matter away from our bodies into a distant elsewhere – this idea of ‘flushing away’ has been achieved in very unsustainable ways, even in the context of the UK. Faecal sludge is seen as something to be pushed away, carrying disease – rather than a nutrient-rich resource we can recycle into biogas or compost. The paradigm of water and capital-intensive solutions is in many ways unsustainable and unattainable.”