Water & Sanitation in Africa KENYA Mass hygiene drive
ETHIOPIA A model to replicate Officials have commended Ethiopia’s ‘One’ model, under which the government runs its Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) National Programme (OWNP). The model translates to a single consolidated WASH account and budget. This enhances transparency in the programme’s management and has helped to improve implementation by eliminating the duplication of roles among partners. The OWNP, which is said to have steadily enhanced the well-being of the country’s rural and urban communities, focuses on constructing new infrastructure to extend access to water and sanitation as well as refurbishing old, disused equipment such as pumping stations and pipelines. Technical training for maintenance
personnel and users is also provided. The OWNP was implemented in 2014 and benefited around 4.3 million people by the end of the five-year first phase in 2019. The Ethiopian government is working with the African Development Bank (AfDB), the World Bank, the British Department for International Development, Finland, the UN Children’s Fund, and other partners to deliver greater access to water across the country. According to Osward Chanda, manager: Water Security and Sanitation Division, AfDB, this financing model is being increasingly adopted across the continent. “Many development partners have come to realise that working and planning together is more efficient, improves harmonisation, and delivers better results for beneficiaries,” he says.
THE GAMBIA Overcoming supply challenges The Gambia has received a US$43 million (R736 million) grant to help strengthen access to energy and water in the country. Nearly 50% of Gambians still have no access to electricity; in urban areas, roughly 69% of the population has access to safe drinking water. Further, the quality of services is weak due to frequent service outages, with some neighbourhoods not receiving water for days, weeks, or even months at a time. While the National Water and Electricity Company (Nawec) has made significant improvements in its operational and financial performance in recent years, the utility has yet to achieve financial viability. Customers still face erratic supply of water and electricity, which have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The additional financing will further strengthen Nawec’s transmission and distribution network, provide additional support to transform Nawec into an efficient and credit-worthy utility, and expand the scope of the Gambia’s Electricity Restoration and Modernisation Project to the water sector.
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Safe Hands Kenya, a mission-driven alliance of Kenyan companies and community organisations, is scaling up its mass sanitation drive to combat Covid-19. Some 1.25 million people were reached during May and part of June in Nairobi. The alliance is on track to reach 2 million people by the end of June with free soap, handwashing stations, face masks, public spraying programmes, and a national behaviour change campaign. Safe Hands is prioritising activities for those in informal settlements, where social distancing and other recommended approaches to curbing the spread of Covid-19 are nearly impossible asks. The alliance has built a geospatial demand and supply allocation map, using several layers of data to target with precision, and partners distribute products using IoT-enabled technologies. The immediate provision of the tools for rapid mass sanitation, accompanied by a highly creative behaviour change campaign to motivate people to use them effectively, is the most effective way to keep people safe and society functioning. The alliance’s approach to product design and distribution is also informed by human-centred design principles to maximise the rate of adoption. The behaviour-change campaign – Tiba Ni Sisi (Swahili: “We are the cure”) – was designed to capture people’s imaginations and pay public health dividends long beyond the Covid-19 pandemic by improving general hygiene practices, with concomitant benefits for other sanitation-related diseases and deaths. Additional Safe Hands chapters are now also up and running in Tanzania and Ethiopia.
