…one of the world’s most prominent development economists says Ghana is proving to be one of the strongest performers on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Africa and unlike some of its African counterparts is likely to fulfill them by the 2015 deadline.
Africa Rising: Jeffrey Sachs says Ghana’s future looks bright
When I first read this, I twitched a little. Jeffrey Sachs suggests that Ghana’s going to fulfil the MDGs by 2015. But is he including MDG 7? Specifically, 7.C? To halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation?
Look at this graph:
It’s World Bank data on the percentage of urban population in Sub-Saharan Africa with access to improved sanitation facilities. Ghana’s second to last. Behind Chad, Benin, Burkina Faso. Until 2000, Ghana was last in the table. According to one World Bank table, Ghana is ninth from last in terms of overall access to improved sanitation. In the world.
Improved sanitation doesn’t mean Dyson hand driers.
Access to improved sanitation facilities refers to the percentage of the population with at least adequate access to excreta disposal facilities that can effectively prevent human, animal, and insect contact with excreta. Improved facilities range from simple but protected pit latrines to flush toilets with a sewerage connection. To be effective, facilities must be correctly constructed and properly maintained.
World Bank
Figures on access to sanitation vary – and the percentage of the population with access to sanitation can be bumped up if you include shared facilities. Shared facilities mean public toilets or those shared by two or more households. In rural areas, 7% of the population with access to sanitation becomes 45% if you include shared facilities. In urban areas of Ghana, 70% of the population use shared sanitation. The WHO / UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation doesn’t accept that improved sanitation includes shared facilities. I can only go on my own limited experience of shared sanitation facilities in rural Ghana – the vast majority of them were in diabolical condition. Many shared toilet facilities are years old or broken, have been out of commission for years. With no education or leadership in managing their own sanitation needs, communities return to open defecation.
Ghana’s current plan is to plough a limited amount of public finance in to sanitation, with the vast majority of the capital expenditure required being covered by households. Under current plans, the Ghanaian government essentially pays to promote CLTS (Community Led Total Sanitation) schemes in rural areas and assist rural banks and microfinance providers in offering finance options to households. In short, the Ghanaian government isn’t paying for any toilets, but they’ll put up adverts telling you to build your own, and point you towards loans to pay for them. In urban areas, there aren’t even any CLTS schemes – so one fewer structure in place to promote, support and push forward sanitation programmes, and only the private sector in a position to deal with human waste – for a price.
Ghana’s not alone. Even the UN admits that “with half the population of developing regions without sanitation, the 2015 [MDG] target appears to be out of reach”. Massive amounts of education, community engagement and support are needed to achieve wider access to improved sanitation in Ghana, in both urban and rural areas. It won’t happen by 2015. If you believe it will, you really do live in cloud poo poo land.
“The people say ‘Why should I use the toilet? It’s fresh air outside, I can chit chat with my friend while I’m squatting there’. Our big breakthrough will happen when we look at the poor as if they are customers. We need to sell them products that are very beautiful and sexy. Once these become objects of desire, if you don’t have, you’re not keeping up with the Jones… we want toilets to become a status symbol for the poor so that they feel proud to own a toilet, just like a Louis Vuitton handbag”.
In the west, we take our toilets for granted. We may buy flashy seats or put amusing books next to them, but that’s about it. They’re clean, they flush, they’re there. The reality for many in the developing world, and certainly Ghana where water and sanitation has been so neglected, is that toilets are horrific places.
Children defacate at an open dump site at Nsuta
Imagine your own child at school, unable to find a lockable, clean toilet. If she’s menstruating, she has nowhere to wash or attend to herself in private. The lavatory is full of shit, the floor is covered in shit, the shit goes up the walls. There are spiders. Cockroaches. Flies. Rats. The stench is unbearable. It’s no surprise then, that people defecate in the open. People may be told they should be using toilets, but toilets are about the worst place they could be. When the government built the toilet years ago and it’s full, falling apart and stinking to high heaven, it becomes an epicentre for health risks, not a shield from them.
For many, toilets have also just always been one option – farmers we spoke to in Ashanti region were quite happy to tell us that they went to the toilet out in the bush. It’s how they’d always done it. One farmer had stubbornly refused to cooperate with building a latrine for his own household, saying “Why should I? I can’t bequeath a toilet to my son”.
Lavatory with raised seat
But households who had been involved with latrine construction projects from the outset, who had invested their own time, effort and materials into latrine construction, who owned their own toilet, who had been educated in the problems caused by open defecation, were often very different in their attitude. Yes, some let their toilets get dirty. Babies may still defecate in the open. Men still pee everywhere. Good grief, everywhere. But in several communities I saw seen toilets with beautiful mosaic floors, toilets kept spotlessly clean, toilets that are kept locked when they’re not being used, with the mother of the household guarding the key. One man, head of the WATSAN committee for his community, keeps his toilet spotlessly clean so that passing volunteers might use it. He tells the village the obronis use his loo.
When latrine construction projects start, builders from each community are trained in the techniques they need to build toilets – it makes them better builders, artisans. They can then build more toilets, train others, earn money and repair what they’ve built. Community leaders work with the builders and with the households to push people along, get things done, mediate. The household gets a lesson in using their new toilet before they start – keep it in good repair, clean it, don’t wipe your bum with stones or corn husks.
Jack Sim would like to ‘sell’ people beautiful toilets – objects of desire like handbags to boast about to the neighbours – and I don’t disagree with his reasoning. But part of the pride of having a toilet, part of what causes villagers to maintain and clean their toilets so assiduously, is down to the effort they had invested and the oversight of their community and their community leaders, down to education, not just down to a flashy loo.
ht @flashmaggie for the video
In other news, we’re back in the UK now and our feet have hardly hit the ground.
I recently travelled out to Nyamebekyere, one of the most remote villages in the cluster, for a series of community focus groups with my colleague Eric. Unusually, we had a driver who was new to the cluster and he was driving an automatic, but we thought nothing of it at the time.
Hot and tired, we finished the focus groups and joined the car, only to realise that the battery was completely flat. It was already past 5pm (it gets dark here from 6pm) so we realised that we had to act fast before the light went – exacerbated by the fact that there is no electricity in Nyamebekyere.
Mobile phone reception was also very patchy, so we spent the next 30 minutes shuffling around the football pitch on the other side of the village, holding our phones about 50cm off the ground, trying to find the one small patch of mobile phone reception that was apparently there! Eventually we had success (although we looked hilarious) so we knew that we would be ‘rescued’ but that this was several hours away.
To our delight, while we’d been scrabbling for phone reception, a passing tro-tro had given our vehicle a jump start so we thought we’d soon be on our way. We said our goodbyes and started driving, and this took us through the semi-permanent mud pool on the edge of the village. And of course….our new driver…in his new automatic 4X4…took us straight into the middle of the water, where the engine promptly cut out!! Some swearing followed with the realisation that we had no battery, no tro to give us a buzz and this time were surrounded by knee-deep water and mud, with failing light. I repeat, there was swearing.
We decided to evacuate the car while we still had some light, so shouted to the kids who were playing nearby to bring across a plank of wood that we spotted lying around. You can see my not so elegant departure below!!
The villagers returned to watch this spectacle, and there was further debate about how we could restart the car. We had success at one point and managed to get the 4X4 out of the water, only for it to completely breakdown a few meters after that. There was nothing more to do other than wait, and luckily, it was a clear night with a full moon and no rain. Once everyone had lost interest and drifted away, it was actually very peaceful, and I spent the time watching bats flying around and listening to unknown animals going “eeek” in the bushes.
After several false hopes, our rescue vehicle finally arrived about 3 hours later and the evening then accelerated as we drove back to the office in record time. It usually takes 1hr 45 mins – 2 hrs but we returned in a high-speed-rally-driving-by-night-record-breaking time of 1hr 20 minutes!!
Thank you to Michael for driving all the way to collect us and to all the villagers who tried to help. I’m not sure what happened to the 4X4…I have a feeling it may still be there……
I took this photo this morning (it’s actually a composite of ten photos). This is a village meeting with some of the residents of a cocoa growing community near Nsuta. Click to embiggen.
I’ve already blogged about a village meeting - timekeeping issues and the like. The image above acts as a kind of roll call. But it also represents something else. A well attended community meeting is one of the prerequisites for the success of a community driven development project.
We nearly left the meeting this morning before it had even started. Nicholas, as he has done before, politely gave one of the organisers ten minutes to ensure that a quorum was formed, as maybe fifteen people were waiting for us when we arrived. At least ten percent of the community must attend meetings like this; in the case of this village of around five hundred, that’s around fifty people.
These meetings are essential for several reasons.
The chief, elders, assembly man or woman, teachers and other community leaders may be present, or conspicuous by their absence. The most successful projects have been driven by strong, present community leaders; the most difficult projects haven’t.
Communities have protocols, whether they’re prayers, the shaking of hands, the statement of a mission, receiving a welcome, invoking the spirits with libation or just good old eye contact. It’s basic respect.
The meeting is to lay out, in no uncertain terms, what is expected of everyone in the community. If it’s the construction of a kindergarten or a clinic for example, it’s essential that people know they will be required to attend communal labour, usually on a weekly basis, to volunteer their time to assist in construction efforts. When work starts and masons are building latrines for example, families need to understand what is expected of them – to provide water for construction work, to find timber for the door frame of the latrine, other stuff. Families may get into arguments with masons if they expect all of this work to be done for them.
Assurances given are witnessed by everyone. Evidence suggests that there’s a shortage of trust in rural communities here – when a chief, an assembly man or anyone else promises something, there are witnesses to the promise.
People need to ask questions. I have a bad back – can I have a raised toilet seat? Can I have a porcelain bowl? Can I have mine first? What size wood for the door frame? How deep is the pit? How long will the latrine last? Can we have a clinic?
People need to tell you things. I can’t lock my sheep up together at night to stop them crapping everywhere, it just makes them easier to steal. This village has two chiefs. Two of our boreholes are broken. At a recent meeting, a drunk guy started piping up. Everyone else shouted him down but Nicholas let him say his piece. It’s important to listen to everyone in the community, including the drunk – as the drunk might just tell you something that no one else thought you needed to hear.
It sounds so obvious that it’s ridiculous, but communities need to take ownership. We’ve seen examples of communities who have had water pumps fitted, schools built, other work done, apparently without any kind of consultation, and then been left with faulty equipment and no idea who to turn to to fix it, or pumps and school buildings that don’t fully satisfy the community’s needs. When the project is complete, and after a period of monitoring and support, it is important to walk away knowing that the community can sustain its own development.
The photo above is a sign that necessary people were there, that enough of the community were there, that some of these questions were asked, protocols observed and information shared. It goes without saying that it’s no guarantee of success, but it’s a start.
Erosion is a huge problem in villages. Farmers who now have access to affordable herbicides spray it on the ground in the villages instead of trimming long grass back to deter snakes. With no vegetation in villages or around houses, the soil melts away in the rainy season and blows away in the dry season. As many houses are built from compacted mud bricks, houses melt away as well.
A few months ago we spoke with a lady about open defecation in her village – was she using a latrine? Her house, built many years ago and which was for the last few months of its life nothing more than a wall with a door in it, had finally collapsed completely. “Look at my house,” she said, “do you think I’m worrying about where I go to the toilet?”
This is a borehole repair at Bosomkyekye, a reasonable size village outside Mampong. A borehole is not an insult. It’s a deep hole drilled in the ground that water comes out of through a pump. Sometimes it’s 120-odd feet deep. That’s not 120 odd feet. They’re quite normal feet. It means approximate, silly.
A borehole water pump comprises a deep hole, down which you’ll find a pipe (made of steel or plastic), with a pump cylinder at the bottom that pulls water up the pipe. At the top, connected to the bottom by lots of metal rods, is a pump handle in a housing. Pump pump pump and up from the depths comes lovely clean water that is safe to drink and totally wet. But metal rods, pipes, pump cylinders and pump handles can all break, especially when pumps are used all day every day by these crazy villagers who insist on drinking, washing and cooking with water. The bits are actually quite delicate, and they have a fairly tough job to do.
Anyway, this borehole wasn’t working, so with the help of some of the villagers, we pulled the whole lot out. You have to lift the pipe and unscrew each ten foot section to take it off, holding on to the pipe for dear life in case the whole thing goes crashing back down the hole. When you start taking it out, you’re lifting the cumulative weight of around 120 feet of steel piping, rods, washers and pump cylinder. It’s heavy. Very. Heavy.
It turned out that this borehole had a faulty pump cylinder. Either by cleaning and checking the cylinder or by replacing the part altogether (in this case a clean and check as an interim fix with the need to fully replace the cylinder as soon as a spare can be obtained), the pump is fixed and water flows again. The repair takes comfortably over an hour and six or seven people including an engineer. Bosomkyekye has three boreholes serving the community, each slightly different, all with faults, all of which needed repair.
Here is water flowing through the pump again, which is very cool. Not cool. Cool as in good.
Many communities where water pumps have been installed have faulty pumps. Iron treatment tanks get full, pump handles break, other components go wrong. The pump stays broken. In some cases the community doesn’t even know which NGO or other agency installed their water pumps. These pumps become little more than useless rusting sculptures while villages are forced to get their water from other sources – rivers, streams, springs. Alternatives are often polluted. Diarrhoea, Bilharzia and other conditions are a risk.
So Ashanti Development, the people I have been working for these last six months, work with communities to establish and support WATSAN (water and sanitation) committees. These committees report to the village Unit Committee. They can hire pump attendants to unlock pumps at set times of the day, keep the pump area clean, charge families to take water (5 pesewas or around 2p for two large jerrycans), manage accounts, and crucially arrange their own repairs when pumps go faulty. WATSAN committees do plenty of other stuff as well but keeping the water flowing in a community is probably their most essential job.
So, a round of applause for the humble borehole pump, and the WATSAN committees who keep them ticking over. And please turn your tap off when you’re brushing your teeth. Thank you.
From the country that brought you Gay Pastor and Black Pope, 2016.
Alien / Predator things – check
Terminator - check
Stunts – check
Gore – check
Explosions – check
Expressions of puzzlement – check
SHOUTING – CHECK
via @io9
George @Ayittey is a Ghanaian economist and author, and he has a problem with African autocrats above all other things, even oppression and mismanagement by colonial powers.
He appears on Twitter every so often, and when he does he usually lets rip with a volley of tweets. He doesn’t pull his punches. When Muammar Gaddafi was killed by NTC soldiers recently, Ayittey suggested that he should be mummified and put on permanent display as an example to other dictators.
He just tweeted this:
Ayittey believes that Africa’s problems should be solved by Africans, particularly the ‘cheetah generation’ of dynamic, intellectually agile and entrepreneurial young Africans who don’t tolerate ineptitude and corruption.
Below is Ayittey speaking in 2007. He is also interviewed in The Browser in which he names 5 essential books on development and Africa.
http://www.ted.com/talks/george_ayittey_on_cheetahs_vs_hippos.html
