Urban water and sanitation problems

Water

Children play with filthy water from a canal in Madagascar’s capital city Antananarivo.

Credit: Brent Stirton

Where there is no safe water supply, people either walk long distances in search of water, collect it from polluted sources such as factory outflows or unprotected wells, or buy jerry cans of water, often of dubious quality, from vendors at vastly inflated prices.

Often poor families pay much more per litre than the better off, who can secure piped connections or afford to invest in their own wells. For example the poorest people from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, spend an average of 10% of their income on water from vendors.

Water scarcity means poor families are only able to use a small amount of water, which affects their ability to wash themselves, their homes and their clothes. They are also hindered from washing by the lack of privacy. The inability to wash furthers the spread of disease and undermines dignity.

In areas with high population density there is increased chance of groundwater pollution, and so hand-dug wells, commonly built in rural areas, are unsuitable. While tubewells that reach deeper water sources can be a viable option, often the preferable solution is to negotiate with existing piped water suppliers, usually the municipality, to extend services into unserved areas and establish communal water points that the community can manage themselves. Nominal fees are charged per bucket collected, which are paid into a fund used to pay the water bills and cover maintenance.

Sanitation

Residents of the slum area Khanjajibaba in the Indian city Gwalior dig a ditch for a new sewer.

Credit: WaterAid / Marco Betti

A lack of toilets means that people have no option but to defecate openly, polluting the environment with hazardous, stinking, raw sewage.

For women adhering to strict standards of modesty, finding somewhere private to go to the toilet is often near to impossible. Many people resort to using plastic bags that are thrown away. These 'flying toilets' typically end up clogging and polluting drainage channels.

As there is often no room to build household pit latrines, and high usage of pit latrines in densely populated areas could risk contamination of the water table, WaterAid's urban sanitation solutions usually involve communal toilet blocks draining into cesspits or municipal sewers. Users pay a monthly fee or a small charge per use. Sometimes, as in Pakistan, communities build miles of their own sewers which connect to the city's main sewer lines.

"Charles Dickens would have felt at home in the streets of Dhaka. The barefoot children waiting for their mothers and sisters to come home from the textile mills; the chimneys of the brick factories, like a throwback to the pages of Bleak House, vaguely visible in the smog. And the stench. "Like Victorian London, the shanty towns of Bangladesh’s capital reek of excrement dropped from makeshift hanging toilets perched precariously on bamboo stilts a couple of metres above the mire." Larry Elliott, Economics Editor, The Guardian, 26 November 2007

Hygiene and environmental sanitation

In urban areas, hygiene education stressing the importance of safe water, effective sanitation and cleanliness is especially important.

Communities are taught the importance of handwashing at critical times, such as before food and after the toilet, as well as how to store and cover water correctly in the house. WaterAid's sanitation work also includes drainage, footpath construction, and solid waste (rubbish) management, all of which help to minimise risks to public health.

Advocacy work

Elizabeth Banda collects water from a communal water point in Malawi's capital Lilongwe.

Credit: WaterAid / Layton Thompson

With such huge numbers without access to water and sanitation WaterAid's country programmes also lobby for governments to reform urban water utilities.

This includes ensuring that agreed obligations to expand affordable water and sanitation services into unserved areas are met. WaterAid also lobbies governments to increase resources for sanitation, which is often given considerably lower political priority than water.