WB WW − 2

Just to say that all the presentations made at the World Bank Water Week are now online here (select a link on the right, not left!), including José Carlos Melo’s and mine (which was on health risks in urban agriculture). There are also some interesting presentations on Climate Resilience of Infrastructure Investments (see also Climate Change more generally).

World Bank Water Week 2009

Last week I was in Washington, DC at the World Bank Water Week. I went to the sessions on urban agriculture and WatSan services for the urban poor. The latter was especially excellent (organized by Martin Gambrill, a Leeds PhD graduate) since a presentation on condominial systems was given by the truly illustrious José Carlos Melo who developed condominial sewerage in the early 1980s in Natal in northeast Brazil. The event served as the launch outside of Brazil of his new book Sistema Condominial: Uma Resposta ao Desafio da Universalização do Saneamento (in English: The Condominial System: A Response to the Challenge of Universal Access to Environmental Sanitation − “saneamento” means more than just sanitation; it encompasses water supply, sanitation, drainage and solid waste management). The book is available in Portuguese as a zip file here; an English translation is being prepared by the World Bank. Zé Carlos is the author of The Experience of Condominial Water and Sewerage Systems in Brazil which was published by WSP in 2005.

All the presentations made at the WB Water Week will be available on the World Bank Water Week website in a couple of weeks. The presentations made at Water Weeks 2001−2007 are available here.

Oh, I nearly forgot: not a mention of EcoSan all week!

Zimbabwe (yet again) and Sierra Leone

Zimbabwe: the BBC news site has yet another disturbing report: Cholera moves to rural Zimbabwe.

And, on a lighter note, see Can Sierra Leone flush away corruption?

And it gets worse …

Another very disturbing report on the BBC News site: Disease and starvation in Zimbabwe – read it and be appalled. Podcast here.

Zimbabwe: cholera

Zimbabwe is a sad example of what happens in a country during the last throes of manic despotism: unimaginable inflation, hunger, the breakdown of public services, contaminated water, and − inevitably − cholera. The whole situation is simply beyond belief. The BBC News site has several pages on the country’s cholera epidemic − for example, Charity warns on Zimbabwe cholera. The 12 December issue of the WHO Weekly Epidemiological Record reports the cholera mortality and morbidity figures given by the Zimbabwean Ministry of Health, which are likely to be gross underestimates. Rather more realistic figures, as of 19 December, are given in WHO’s Global Task Force on Cholera Control short report Cholera Country Profile: Zimbabwe.

No chance, then, of a Happy New Year in Zimbabwe. Things might improve in April/May if (when) Jacob Zuma becomes president of South Africa − as a Zulu he will hopefully remember the Ndebele massacres in the 1980s and simply say to Mugabe ‘leave office now or in come my Zulu regiments’. Unfortunately for many (probably most) Zimbabweans the water will stay contaminated until Mugabe goes and the cholera will continue, reinforcing the view (here) that Africa has become the new homeland for this disease.

Of course, we’ve known since 1854 that cholera can be transmitted through “the medium of polluted water” (and water gets polluted due to poor sanitation and hygiene), but we need to remember this historical lesson − as Robert Jacob Goodkin said, “Look to the past for guidance into the future”.

What has IYS2008 achieved?

As we end the International Year of Sanitation 2008 it’s timely to ask what’s been achieved. Well, no great reduction (if any at all) in the numbers of people needing good sanitation (and ‘good’ = ‘adequate’, not ‘improved’). But this wasn’t really the point of IYS2008. Rather, it was to raise awareness about the truly awful (shocking, shameful, disgraceful − take your pick of adjective) state of sanitation in the developing world today, and this it has done very successfully. At least political leaders can’t now claim to be ignorant about the awful/shocking/shameful/disgraceful state of sanitation in their countries: there’ve been regional sanitation conferences in all parts of the developing world, each with its own Declaration. But the poor need sanitation now, not just politicians talking about it − so we’ll just have to wait and see if there are Actions on the scale required, in addition to all those fine Words.

Isn’t it very extraordinary that politicians in many developing countries still continue to allow their people, in huge numbers, to live without adequate water supplies and adequate sanitation − actually to die in huge numbers because they lack an adequate water supply and adequate sanitation? I wonder if they’ll ever really wake up and face facts. Time is not on the side of the Poor.

This blog will continue into 2009 and beyond...

More good reads!

Three more good reads for IYS2008: (1) Sanitation Challenges and Solutions (IWA Reference Paper, 2008); (2) Progress and Prospects on Water: For a Clean and Healthy World, with Special Focus on Sanitation − Synthesis of the 2008 Stockholm World Water Week (SIWI, 2008), especially pages 7−12; and (3) Water and Sanitation For Developing Clean and Healthy Cities − Seminar Report from the World Urban Forum 4, Nanjing, China (SIWI, 2008).

The last publication includes the presentation Water & Sanitation for Developing Clean and Healthy Cities by Dr Graham Alabaster of UN-Habitat, in which he presented the Lake Victoria sampling data for water supply in Kenya as an example to show that statistics on access to water coverage change significantly when quantity, cost and burden of collection are considered. (Monitoring that only looks at the type of water source can mislead policy makers who rely on these statistics.) The extreme case here is the town of Kisii where 71 percent of the population had access to an “improved” water supply in 2006, but only 2 percent had access to an “adequate” water supply (defined as >20 litres of water per person per day, <10 percent of household income spent on water, and <1 hour per household per day spent collecting water) (see blog of 14 January).