The unavailability of essential services, such as electricity, proper sanitation, piped water, good health services, and education facilities, as well as good roads, has often driven populations living in rural areas to shift to urban areas, where such services are believed to subsist. However, lately, a growing number of the urban populations’ access to said basic services has drastically been constrained, mostly for those living in low-income areas and informal settlements, also known as LIA and IS (Chitonge, 2014:58). This essay will focus on challenges facing basic service provisions in Sub-Saharan cities, specifically discussing factors influencing the sanitation and drainage of water in the region. First, it will describe urban poverty and its dimensions. Second, it will define Sub-Saharan African cities and their common characteristics, in addition to service delivery and its components in general, before it moves on to provide a list of factors known to affect the quality of those services and what can be done in order to overcome those challenges. To do so, this essay will use an assortment of journal articles and books as evidence to support the arguments made, as well as a case study of Addis Ababa.
First and foremost, there is no one definition of urban poverty. However, according to Masika in her paper ‘Urbanisation and Urban Poverty: A Gender Analysis’, there are two approaches to understanding urban poverty. One where incomes, consumption and other social indicators, such as life expectancy, mortality rates, nutrition, literacy rate and household expenditure on goods and services are taken into account. The first approach is from an economic perspective. The second approach involves concepts such as non-material deprivation and social differentiation, in other words, an anthropological perspective (Wratten, 1995; Satterthwaite, 1995; cited in Masika, 1997:2). This essay will consider both approaches to both material and non-material deprivations matter on the issue of basic service provisions, where sometimes the community will seek to solve those problems independently when feeling left out by their governments. It is important to note out that urban poverty does not necessarily mean economic failures. The urban poor is not one group, but rather many, with different needs and levels of vulnerability, depending on the setting. The reason we need to understand urban poverty first is that Sub-Saharan cities are characterized by being poverty-stricken and underdeveloped. This understanding will give an insight into the lives people living in those regions lead and how complicated it can be to overcome such issues using one approach (Baharoglu et al., n.d.).
Sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, is a region separate from North Africa, characterized by common historical, physical and social characteristics, including the aftermaths of European colonialism and slavery, and a tropical climate. Sub-Saharan African spreads throughout 43 countries, five island nations and the French territory of Reunion. There is a rapid increase in population growth, now at 600 million, that grows its good and often live in rural villages, with only 30% living in urban areas. This growth is even worse in urban areas, and not just due to migration as previously believed, but natural means as well (UN-HABITAT, 2013:25; cited in Chitonge, 2014:59).
In order to make the most of urban life and provide protection to the community, provision of good essential services is required (Hove et al., 2013:7). Service problems in Sub-Saharan Africa include transport, housing, electricity, sewerage, water and waste management. There is an enormous gap between the supply and demand of services in most African cities, that the problem is no longer only confined to the quality of those services, but rather the inability to meet the people’s needs and demands. That has resulted in the poor and other income groups to resort to their housing and water facilities, which cannot be regarded as services since they self-provided (Richard et al., 1989:354). A recurring issue in poverty-stricken communities in urban areas is that they are often offered with services of reduced quality, while upper-income groups indulge in good-quality services, connected to their homes, and at a lower cost (Anon, 2003). Moreover, there has been an escalation in the number of slums, where thousands of people are living in unsuitable housing, with no sewage, electricity, water facilities or even safe roads (World Bank, 2005; cited in Hove et al., 2013:8).
There is a claim that water scarcity is the cause of most water provision problems. However, it has been argued that there is no such connection, neither in rural nor urban populations. On the other hand, there is little to no shortage of freshwater in the major cities where there is a problem of inadequacy (Anon, 2003:6). On the contrary, freshwater is abundant, but the problem has rather do with insufficiency and inaccessibility due to issues discussed later in the essay. Due to diseases resulting from the inadequate provision of basic water needs and sanitation, more than a hundred million infants and children die each year or are exposed to constant suffering (Anon, 2003:5).
Along the reasons for why an increasing number of the urban population is struggling with challenges facing water services are rapid population growth in both LIA and IS, water services gaining low political priority, in addition to the failure to build back up the colonial management and urban planning patterns (Chitonge, 2014:58). Moreover, there is an inability to meet with the growing demand of the exceedingly growing urban populations (UN-HABITAT, 2013:25; cited in Chitonge, 2014:59). Progressively, and specifically in the 90’s, the access to improved water services and sanitation facilities increased. Again, that improvement was exceeded by the pressure of rapid urban population growth. Governments were struggling to correlate maintenance and investments, in addition to their neglect of informal settlement expansions as a priority (Keener et al., 2010:1; cited in Chitonge, 2014: 64). Consequently, nowadays a large portion of the population relies on the deteriorating sources of water and sanitation (Torres, 2012:1; cited in Chitonge, 2014:62).
The challenge is not only to expand those services to people unable to attain water services in LIA and IF but also to improve the quality of those services. In poor and poverty-stricken countries, such challenges never received high priority by governments, resulting in funding gaps, one of the major challenges facing African cities in terms of inadequate maintenance and development of water infrastructure (Banerjee et al., 2011; cited in Chitonge, 2014:64). So long as there was water coming through the pipes, any improvement plans or rehabilitation expenditures were postponed (Chitonge, 2014:76-7). To be more specific, Chitonge has listed a number of challenges that were facing water services, and these included constrained capacity, or water utilities inability to expand their production and distribution capacity due to low capital investments, resulting in failure to meet the growing demand of a growing urban population. Even worse, many of those water utilities are operating at full capacity, meaning there is no room for improvement of neither production nor distribution. Another challenge is that during colonial rule, any water services were designed and schemed for use in formal areas, where colonial officials and some African professionals resided. Otherwise, if the area was inhabited by African people, it was often neglected or offered with poor-quality services. Those colonial water services remained, and the majority of households are now being served either through flawed standpipes or kiosks (Chitonge, 2014:77-80).
Whether a country has experienced sustained economic growth or not, does not mean that basic infrastructure was being developed. The former came about a result of mentioned funding gaps, for governments were primarily focused on energy and transport as main sectors to improve economic growth. However, the threat was not only from funding gaps but rather the allocation of adequate resources as well by innovative means. For example, driving both international and local resources in human resource form (ECA, 2012; cited in Chitonge, 2014:78), which is another challenge on its own. Bad infrastructure makes it difficult to improve service efficiency, often resulting in leakages and massive amounts of water waste. The constant failures by the government to prioritize those challenges led to the hope that the private sector would take control of the situation, and bring capital investments for which governments were desperately in need (Chitonge, 2014:65).
It is important to note that the responsibility for the provision of some of the basic services is either shared or is exclusive to central governments. Governments and incompetent policy frameworks play an important role in increasing vulnerability (Baharoglu et al., n.d.). Along with the poor maintenance of facilities, this has resulted in traffic congestion, lack of public transport, unsafe roads, unreliable electricity, poor telecommunication and inadequate water supply (Hove et al., 2013:8). Nowadays, these conditions are becoming “the norm rather than the exception,” even in the wealthy parts of the city (Newsday, 2012; cited in Hove et al., 2013:8). However, it has been settled that most of the plans where the private sector was involved have proven unsuccessful in overcoming financial issues. As a consequence, a majority of the contracts were either canceled or announced in distress (World Bank, 2005; cited in Chitonge, 2014:66). The promotion of the private sector as the ultimate solution to those issues persisted for more than a decade. Over time, it was evident that the involvement of the private sector did not change anything; there were no benefits and the scale on which it operated remained the same (Anon, 2003:4).
One more way the private sector contributed to solving basic service provision issues was through lease contracts. That was most apparent in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, but even then, there was an increase in connections under those leases, which eventually required funding through public rather than the private sector (Hall et al., 2006:19). The affair with the private sector is that it is willing, though not always, to manage water operations without financing new works or covering expansion. In the long term, that means that eventually, financing will come from tariff revenues and the public sector. Again, leading to the funding gap problem evident in government and public strategies (Hall et al., 2006:17). The trend toward the privatization of water supplies is fairly a recent one. However, most of the countries in Southern Africa are still trying to survive without the involvement of the private sector (Nickson, 1998:1). Therefore, the monitoring by local governments of private sector activity, especially prior to any interventions is also critical to the success of the private sector’s involvement (Nickson, 1991:1).
Solutions may not always operate top-down but can be community-based. For example, there is the provision of basic water needs proposed by the community for the community, or LIA and IS, with little external funding. The intervention itself, undoubtedly, was modest in terms of scale and impact, compared to ones initiated by government or capital investors. The community, nevertheless, successfully guaranteed more regular supplies, such as water tanks. That was also proof of what cooperation between community organizations and local government can achieve to improve the use of local resources and provision of basic needs (Anon, 2003:4). However, despite the endurance of community-based services, there were still formal restrictions, or limitations to a passage in the public sector, where entrepreneurs that were not operating within the official system considered irregular, or even illegal. Whether the methods of those informal stakeholders have been successful in the long term or not is a matter of debate, as there is not enough information about what functions outside the law. Moreover, those “irregular” service providers did not qualify for support from banks, and therefore, no records of their activity are available. (Solo, 1999:118).
To overcome problems with provision of basic water services in Sub-Saharan Africa, all or at least most of the challenges must be taken into account. In reality, this system of infrastructure is interconnected, where each component affects the other. There are two approaches to in this sense, first is that water must be recognized as having economic value and not just a social good. Second approach is that key local stakeholders should manage water supplies entirely (Nickson, 1998: 1).
When both the government and the private sector struggled to solve discussed problems, emerged the idea of the “other private”, which included households with water and sanitation connections who would provide water services to their neighbours, in the form of water points and latrines owned by persons within the community, and that constituted the fastest growing water provision methods in cities like Dhaka in Addis Ababa, sewage removal services in Abidjan, Dar es Salam and most of the other Sub-Saharan cities. More intricately, the other private was able to offer private waste water treatment plants dumping produce that has been through secondary treatment into the ocean water, in addition to privately owned, but publicly managed toilets and bath houses at subsidized rates. The former are examples of services provided privately, from not only Africa, but cities from all over the world that can be adopted and utilized for use within Sub-Saharan cities, of course with the support of local governments, and perhaps private sectors (Solo, 1999:121-2). Independent entrepreneurs, or the “other private” sector has advantages over other sectors, such as: financial sustainability, without public subsidies, borrowing or debt. They connect with their customers on a personal level, as long as payments are made directly, andelling water services at lower prices than other sectors, even when competing over markets (Solo, 1999:122-6).
The following case study of Addis Ababa back in the mid 90’s is an example of how a large number of projects does not stand for success, and how physical and institutional integration is important. There are serious sanitation issues in Addis Ababa. As mentioned earlier, the rapid population growth, at 2 million in 1994, has caused the infrastructure to no longer support the community’s demands. This failure has led to problems in drainage, solid waste disposal and water supply. At the time, the sanitation system in Addis Ababa was limited to traditional sewage and on-site systems, piped and open ditches, in addition to dump trucks. Issues in the system were aggravated by insufficient operation and maintenance, as well as the full absence of infrastructure in some districts. A study analyzed the existing environmental sanitation projects then to understand their extent, perseverance in terms of implementation and effectiveness. Overall, 23 non-governmental organizations and 19 government agencies were involved. The level of integration in these projects was somewhat low. Aspects were not fully dealt with, but rather one project would deal with one aspect, for example, one project dealing with waste water disposal. Recommendations included creating sanitation projects based on site rather than by project to accommodate the site and the community’s needs, encouraging cooperation between managements, involving the community as much as possible and giving voice to those most vulnerable. More importantly, raising awareness through educative efforts and campaigns to include the community and drive it to its full potential (CERFE, 1997:1-4).
To sum up, this essay has defined urban poverty and its approaches, in addition to Sub-Saharan cities and their common characteristics. It has given a general description of basic service problems facing the region, before discussing more specifically water-based issues. It has also demonstrated why government and private sector efforts could not conquer those major concerns, in addition to what we can learn from cooperating with entrepreneurs and the informal sector. Finally, this essay presented the case study of Addis Ababa as an example of the how multiple projects does not stand for success, and how community involvement is important. The issue of basic need provision in Sub-Saharan cities is undoubtedly a complex one. It is not a challenge that can be overcome overnight and will require the collaborative effort of different sectors. Through solving housing problems, unemployment and water sanitation problems, and at the same time, improving infrastructure development, Sub-Saharan cities can defeat threats posed against their communities, increasing security, and even creating positive urban-rural links (Hove et al, 2013:8).