Covid-19 has again demonstrated the significance of safe, accessible and affordable water for all and the enormous disparities in service provision while at the same time dealing a blow to public water and sanitation operators around the world due to massive drops in revenues, rapidly rising costs and concerns about health and safety in the workplace. This book provides the first global overview of the response of public water operators to this crisis, shining a light on the complex challenges they face and how they have responded in different contexts. It looks specifically at ‘public’ water and asks how public ownership and public management have enabled (or not) equitable and democratic emergency services, and how these COVID-19 experiences could contribute to expanded and sustainable forms of public water services in the future
Poverty and health
As Africa marked the Day of the African Child on 16 June, the Kenyan government launched an eight-year strategy aimed at delivering efficient and effective health services to improve the lives of women and children. ‘It [the strategy] aims at contributing to the reduction in health inequalities and reversing the downward trend in health-related indicators with a focus on child survival and development,’ Beth Mugo, the Minister for Public Health and Sanitation, said in Nairobi when she launched the ‘Child Survival and Development Strategy 2008–2015’. The ministry developed the strategy with other line ministries as well as representatives of civil society, academia, the donor community and general population. Kenya has one of the highest numbers of newborn deaths in Africa, with a neo-natal mortality rate of 33 per 1,000 live births – approximately 43,600 deaths every year.
In October, the Global AgeWatch Index issued a report on the quality of life of older people in 91 nations. The report included several factors such as income security, health and well-being, employment and education. African nations did not fare well. South Africa was the highest ranked African nation at number 65 while Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria, Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania came in at numbers 69, 81, 85, 86, 87 and 90 respectively. Other African nations were not included in the report because there was not sufficient data. With South Africa leading the pack in elderly well-being, it helps to decipher the various ways it deals with its senior citizens.
Rapid urbanisation is a fact of life even in the least developed countries where the lion’s share of the population presently lives in rural areas and will continue to do so for decades to come. This paper examines the causes, consequences and policy implications of ongoing urbanisation in Africa’s less-developed countries (LDCs). The authors find that the employment opportunities in both the rural or urban sectors are not growing adequately. The emerging trends and patterns of urbanisation in the African LDCs are analysed, with a strong emphasis on rural-urban migration and the informal sectors. The paper argues that it is necessary to reverse the trends in aid and provide a much larger share of aid for productive sector development, including the development of rural and urban areas. Also the development of agricultural and non-agricultural sectors is needed, in line with the perspective of the dual-dual model. Although urban centres mostly host non-agricultural industries, sustainable urbanisation also strongly depends on what happens in the agricultural sectors. Productive employment opportunities in rural areas are important in order to combat an unsustainable migration from rural areas to urban centres, and productive employment opportunities in urban centres are essential to absorb the rapidly increasing labour force in the non-agricultural sector. Authors recommend building up productive capacities to create adequate employment and incomes for the rapidly growing population, particularly in the urban areas.
This paper argues that it is necessary to reverse the trends in aid, and provide a much larger share of aid for productive sector development, including development of rural and urban areas, and the development of agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. Although urban centres mostly host non-agricultural industries, sustainable urbanisation also strongly depends on what happens in the agricultural sectors. Productive employment opportunities in rural areas are important to combat an unsustainable migration from rural areas to urban centres, and productive employment opportunities in urban centres are essential to absorb the rapidly increasing labour force in the non-agricultural sector. Successful urban development cannot be separated from successful rural development.
Globally, many human rights NGOs seek to expose the dire situations where children work at a young age, often under exploitative conditions and without adequate compensation. According to the International Labour Organization, child labour occurs most frequently in Sub-Saharan Africa — 28 percent of all 5-14 year-olds are engaged in paid and unpaid work across the continent, compared to 14 percent in Asia and 9 percent for Latin America. The author argues that what’s often missing from these official statistics, however, are routine household work activities that are less visible than those in the industrial sector. These less conspicuous types of labour are varied and, despite the potential for violations to go unseen, can sometimes be part of a healthy childhood. The distinction between ‘child work’ (less harmful work that may have beneficial impacts on a child’s development) and ‘child labour’ (blatantly hazardous forms of work that disrupt the healthy development of a child), can therefore be a helpful one to make.
The poor suffer from far higher levels of ill health, mortality, and malnutrition than do the better-off; and their inadequate health is one of the factors keeping them poor or for their being poor in the first place. The health of the poor must thus be a matter of major concern for everyone committed to equitable development, from policy makers to service providers. Health services can make an important contribution to improved health conditions among disadvantaged groups. Yet as the contents of this volume make clear, the health services supported by governments and by agencies like ours too often fail to reach these people who need them most.
This 350-page volume features eleven of the "Reaching the Poor Programme"-commissioned studies, along with introductory chapters explaining why the studies were undertaken, how they were done, and what they found. The book marshals the available evidence about pro-poor strategies that have proven to be effective and that can help in the development of programs to better assist disadvantaged groups. In doing so, it can serve as a resource for policy makers, development practitioners, and policy analysts concerned with health conditions among the poor.
Just four months ago, the fishing harbour at Kachulu on the western shores of Lake Chilwa in Malawi was bustling with fishermen and traders haggling over the catch of the day. Today hundreds of fishing boats sit marooned on cracked, dry mud as vultures fly above the shores of the once productive fishing zone 30 kilometres (19 miles) east of the southern African country's old capital Zomba. Julius Nkhata, a local villager, says the increasingly dramatic seasonal dry-out of the lake -- blamed by experts on man-made climate change -- has displaced local people and increased joblessness. One-and-a-half million people live in the areas on the Lake Chilwa basin, which is one of the most densely populated areas in southern Africa. Nixon Masi, a government fishery official at Chilwa, said a women's fish-drying cooperative that depends on the lake had been devastated. "There is no fish. This has resulted in a big problem as the women from the cooperative have no source of income," he said. Of the initial 38 members, 21 have left to rebuild their lives elsewhere.
According to the latest estimates from the World Health Organization/United Nations Children’s Fund Joint Monitoring Programme for water and sanitation (JMP), 2.5 billion people worldwide do not have access to any type of improved sanitation. Current definitions do not account for the diversity of shared sanitation: all shared toilet facilities are by default classified as unimproved by JMP because of the tendency for shared toilets to be poorly managed and unhygienic. However, the authors argue that shared sanitation should not be automatically assumed to be unimproved. They also argue that it is necessary to have a new look at how we define shared sanitation and to use specific subcategories including household shared (sharing between a limited number of households who know each other), public toilets (intended for a transient population, but most often the main sanitation facility for poor neighbourhoods) and institutional toilets (workplaces, markets etc.). This sub-classification will, it is argued, identify those depending on household shared sanitation, which the authors consider to be only a small step away from achieving access to private and improved sanitation. This subcategory of shared sanitation is, therefore, worth discussing in greater detail. The authors argue that the focus for future sanitation programmes should be on improving the hygienic standards of shared facilities to a level that satisfies and protects sanitation users.