Kenya: cholera outbreaks in the north, Coast and Nairobi slums

In early October 2009, at least 29 people died of cholera and hundreds more were being treated for cholera-related symptoms such as acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) in the larger Turkana District in the northwest and in the eastern regions of Garbatulla and Laisamis, say health officials. The regions are not only facing an acute water shortage, due to a prolonged drought, but also have poor latrine coverage.

Cholera has also surfaced in several parts of the Coast in the aftermath of flooding. Coast Provincial Medical Officer Dr Anisa Omar confirmed on 3 November 2009, that 12 people have been admitted at Lamu district hospital after contracting cholera. There were also outbreaks of water-borne diseases in Magarini and Tana Delta district.

Cholera has also killed 11 people in Nairobi. The first case was reported in the sprawling Mukuru kwa Njenga slum. Some 949 people — most of them pregnant women and children under five years — had been treated for cholera and other water-borne diseases like diarrhoea, vomiting and dysentery.

See below two NTVKenya video reports on cholera in Mukuru, which also show the poor sanitary conditions in the slum.

Source: IRIN, 09 Oct 2009 ; Mathias Ringa, Daily Nation / allAfrica.com, 03 Nov 2009 ; Mike Mwaniki, Daily Nation, allAfrica.com, 29 October 2009

Kenya: two million people live in a human rights black hole in the slums of Nairobi

The Kenyan Public Health Act prescribes the health and safety measures that landlords must comply with, including the provision of sanitation and other services. As with other provisions, the local authorities do not enforce these against landlords or developers who build and rent homes in slums and settlements like Kibera.

Amnesty International has visited Kibera and other Nairobi slums as part of their global “Demand Dignity” campaign. The lack of adequate water and sanitation are recognized as human rights abuses. Amnesty is mobilizing slum residents to demand adequate housing and basic services.

Amnesty International released its report “The Unseen Majority: Nairobi’s Two Million Slum Dwellers” on 19 June 2009, which describes the dire conditions and gross human rights abuses endured in Nairobi’s informal settlements.

A performer from Black Marimba Cultural troop entertains marchers as they gather at Central Park, Nairobi. Photo: Amnesty International

Amnesty International’s Demand Dignity campaign aims to end global poverty by working to strengthen recognition and protection of the rights of the poor. Besides on slums, the campaign focuses on maternal mortality, corporate accountability and making rights law.

Read more on the Demand Dignity campaign web site

Demand Dignity Poster. Amnesty International

Source: Amnesty International, 19 Jun 2009

Senegal, Dakar: slum uses garbage to stay dry

In Médina Gounass neighborhood of Guédiawaye, a slum on the outskirts of Dakar, people use garbage “to shore up their flood-prone houses and streets”. “Garbage, packed down tight and then covered with a thin layer of sand, is used to raise the floors of houses that flood regularly in the brief but intense summer rainy season, and it is packed into the dusty streets that otherwise become canals. The water lingers for months in the low-lying terrain of this bone-dry country. Garbage is a surrogate building material, a critical filler to deal with the stagnant water — cheap, instantly accessible and never diminishing. The plastic-laden spillover from these foul-smelling deliveries pokes up through the sandy lots, covers the ground between the crumbling cinder-block houses, becomes grazing ground for goats, playground for barefoot, runny-nosed children and breeding ground for swarms of flies. Disease flourishes here, aid groups say: cholera, malaria, yellow fever and tuberculosis”.

[...] “In an upside-down world where garbage is sought for and dumped among homes, not removed, “people have no alternatives; they are left to themselves; they can only count on themselves,” said Joseph Gaï Ramaka, a leading Senegalese filmmaker, who made a documentary [see below] about an incomplete government effort, the Plan Jaxaay, to build modern housing for people in vulnerable neighborhoods. 

Read more: Adam Nossiner, New York Times, 03 May 2009

Tanzania, Arusha: Rotary Club Donates Toilet Facilities to Slum Dwellers

Residents of a slum area in Sakina, west of the municipality [of Arusha] who for a long time had no access to toilets are now proud owners of facilities built through the help of the Rotary Club of Arusha. The facilities [...] will be under the supervision of Rotary Community Corps who will collect users fees for maintenance and cleanliness. The community corps is composed of residents of the slum who are beneficiaries of the toilets and bathrooms.

The facilities will serve 25 families which previously used plastic bags, famous by the name of Rambo, as toilets and subsequently dumped them near their houses or on roadsides. The facilities cost Tsh.2.3 million, an amount raised by members of the club.

Source: Edward Selasini, Arusha Times / allAfrica.com, 15 Feb 2009

Indonesia: Educating Kids for a Healthy Future

By teaching children proper hygiene practices, a teacher educates and improves the health of poor river communities.

[...] For 11 years, Nurhayati, or Teacher Nur has been teaching proper hygiene practices and caring for the environment to her students in communities along the Kali Malang and Sunter riverbanks in Jakarta. She also encourages residents to use the public toilets built by the government.

[...] Today, even with public toilets, the communities’ onslaught to the environment continues. Teacher Nur brings her classes by the river to show her students the murky water and floating garbage as evidence of the communities’ indiscreet waste disposal.

[...] Indonesia has about 66 million people practicing open defecation (OD), more than one-third of the country’s total population. Next to India, it is the most OD-prevalent country in the world. .

Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital with a population of almost 10 million, obtains about 80% of its fresh water supply from the Citarum River [often called the world's most polluted river]. [...] Slum communities clustered around [...] waterways contribute greatly to the city’s severe water pollution.

[Poor sanitation in Indonesia is a leading cause of] diarrhea [which] alone claims almost 100,000 babies’ lives every year.

Residents of the slum communities {living] along [...] riverbanks [...] cannot afford the most basic sanitation facilities, [and] dispose of their wastes directly into the waterways.

[...] At school, Teacher Nur’s students wash their hands and brush their teeth together, while singing songs about hygiene and cleanliness. But her greatest accomplishment is that her students bring the lessons they have learned in school into their homes and share them with the entire household.

Since the government built the public facilities, Nurul, a girl and one of Teacher Nur’s students, and her mother have been using them everyday.

[...] The public toilets are not enough. Nurul and her mother have to stand in line for hours before they can use the facilities. Furthermore, some public toilets require a certain fee and most poor families have to scrimp for the costs. Nurul said, “I must pay 500 (rupiahs) to take a shower and another 500 to use the toilet. If it’s full, we shower outside. My mother pumps out water from the deep well.”

In 2008, in line with the United Nations’ Year of Sanitation, Indonesia launched a National Strategy for Community-Based Total Sanitation, which aims to provide 10,000 communities with access to clean water and sanitation by 2012. [The Asian Development Bank] ADB [...] is also working with the Indonesian government on increasing sanitation coverage in the country.

Source: Cezar Tigno, ADB, Feb 2009

India, Bangalore: Changing the Sanitation Landscape

The residents of Sudhamnagar, a slum community in Bangalore, made the big leap from defecating in the open until 2007 to having household latrines in 2009, proving that once people understand what they’re missing, they will find ways to get it.

Sudhamnagar comprises 300 households of mostly daily wage earners. For a long time residents had no access to safe water supply, no basic sanitation facility in their homes, limited educational opportunity for children, and very little hope for a better quality of life.

“Everything changed when AVAS [Association for Volunteer Action and Services] stepped in and helped us by constructing a community toilet,” says Josephine, a local resident and member of the WATSAN committee.

In a dialogue faciltated by AVAS, residents identified basic facilities like housing, water, sanitation, and electricity as their most urgent needs. The dialogue later branched out to wider grounds-from education to health to land tenure to livelihood.

After ensuring that the community had stable land rights, AVAS and the WATSAN Committee negotiated with the local government and the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) for the installation of water connections and construction of public toilets.

The public toilets were so popular that frequent use led to maintenance and cleanliness problems. As a result residents began constructing household latrines with technical guidance from AVAS, a little financial assistance, and the support of the WATSAN Committees.

The community’s efforts easily demystify many myths about sanitation: that sanitation requires expensive and high-tech solutions, that the poor have more important needs than sanitation, or that governments and utilities do not have access to financing for sanitation.

“The poor are willing to pay if they have access to the service,” says Anita Reddy, AVAS’ Managing Trustee. “Accessibility, affordability, and participation in decision making are the critical ingredients that helped the residents change their lifelong habits,” she added.

See also: Water rights: access to water means access to education in the slums of Bangalore, India, Source South Asia, 19 Nov 2007

Contact: Association for Voluntary Action and Service (AVAS), No. 9, 5th Cross, Puttaiah Compound, Ashwath Nagar, Bangalore 560094, India, Ph: +91-80-23516227, Email: avas [at] vsnl.com

Source: Ma. Christina Dueñas, ADB, Feb 2009

The Atieno Family – the whole story

Artists: Joseph Nzomo & Salim Busuru, nxgraphics@gmail.com

Artists Joseph Nzomo and Salim Busuru from Kenya created the Atieno family and the comic strip which tells the story of their lives in the slums. The comic strip was commissioned for the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre symposium ‘Sanitation for the Urban Poor: Partnerships and Governance’ (19 – 21 November 2008, Delft, the Netherlands). You can read the whole story here.

Uganda: new research to examine the sanitation crisis in slums

An interdisciplinary research program entitled “Integrated approaches and strategies to address the Sanitation Crisis in Unsewered Slum Areas in African mega-cities (SCUSA)”, funded by the UNESCO-IHE Partnership Research Fund (UPaRF), will be carried out by UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education (Delft, The Netherlands), Makerere University, and the Kampala City Council, both in Uganda.

The SCUSA research program has identified three PhD projects, centered around a slum area of Kampala for which PhD researchers are being recruited:

• Wastewater and solid waste treatment and reuse
• The socio-economic aspects of improving sanitation
• Hydrology and contaminant transport

Research is planned to start in January 2009.

Read more

Uganda: Kampala Slum Dwellers Turn to ‘Flying Toilets’

“Kampala’s population is soaring with many people living in slum areas. However, the law does not allow KCC, the major provider of sanitation services, to work with informal settlements, writes Frederick Womakuyu.

An overflowing pit latrine empties its contents into a worm-infested drainage channel in front of Catherine Namubiru’s home in Kisenyi, a Kampala slum. Less than 10 such latrines serve a population of 3,000 people living in this area.

The latrines are dilapidated with rusty iron sheets for walls, cracked floors and are roofed with plastic material. Little wonder that many inhabitants of “Mogadishu” in the heart of Kisenyi use ‘flying toilets‘ “.

[...]

While initiatives like the Kampala Urban Sanitation Project (KUSP) have lead to some improvement, “the problem of flying toilets will remain with us as long as the Government does not set up a clear policy to deal with slums”, says Fred Katabazi, the director of Tweyembe Development Association, an NGO that seeks to improve sanitation in slums. “People keep migrating from rural to urban areas,” he added.

Source: Frederick Womakuyu, New Vision (Kampala) / allAfrica.com, 06 Jul 2008

Uganda – 80% slum dwellers lack pit-latrines

CLOSE to 80% of slum dwellers in Kampala lack access to toilets, a study conducted by Action Aid International has said.

The study that was carried out in Kawempe division attributed the problem to inadequate funding by the Government to the water and sanitation sectors.

“It is rather unfortunate that in this era, 79% of the slum dwellers can’t access toilets. This has compounded the sanitation problem,” said country director, Charles Busingye.

Read More – New Vision Online

According to the population census of 2002, there are over 1.5 million people living in Kampala slums.