Africa's WASH Nexus

This post wishes to provide an interesting account of some widely used bottom-up WASH techniques in Africa. Due to government failures in public WASH service provision, these techniques present a compromised yet essential WASH solution. Understanding these techniques allows later exploration of their weaknesses, potential improvements, and complementary solutions for successful WASH improvements. Water-accessing techniques Without adequate piped water supply,  hand-dug wells , which citizens themselves can construct and operate at low costs, are a traditional and common water-accessing technique. The water in the well can be extracted using a pulley device or, preferably, a sealed handpump.  A proper structure that prevents the seeping of surface water and filters silt and sand , illustrated by fig.1, can ensure water safety.  Fig.1 :  The structure of a hand-dug well . Comparably, despite moderately higher construction and operation costs,  boreholes  equi...

I would like to welcome everyone onboard to my introductory blog post! Today, let's search for answers to the topical question.  Fig.1 : SDG 6 Let us first try to define each component of WASH.  The UN's definitions in SDG 6  (fig.1) provide a good starting point. "Water" stands for uncontaminated water access. A common misconception is that water accessibility equates to availability (which relates to water scarcity).  Water availability is often "idly" defined regarding river discharge but ignores other water resources and the infrastructure investment required to make them available ( Cairncross, 2003 ;  Damkjaer & Taylor, 2017 ). "Sanitation" usually concerns access to safe treatment and disposal of wastewater that prevents human contact.  Hygiene refers to individualised "practices or conditions that ensure health and prevent diseases". e.g., handwashing . The components are highly interlinked. For instance, safe sanitation acces...