Is WASH getting in the way of sustainable cities?

Sustainable Development Goal 11 calls for a focus on building “safe, resilient, and sustainable” cities. But currently, almost 900 million city dwellers don’t have access to safe water or sanitation.

Kariuki Mugo, director of WASH sector support at Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor, said a lack of good WASH services is standing in the way of achieving global development goals in cities.

“Water and sanitation is a critical driver of every city life,” Mugo said. “When you're talking about water in cities, you're talking about people's lives and also you're talking about the city economy. So the two quite intersect and interplay very strongly.”

A 2016 United Nations report found that 3 out of 4 jobs depend on water. But in a city like Nairobi, Kenya, only 40% of the population is connected to a sewage system. An increasing number of people there are living in low-income settlements that lack water and sanitation, according to the World Bank.

“That’s a huge economic bottleneck,” Mugo said, adding that water and wastewater systems are needed for agriculture and business — and without them, economic growth is stunted.

But providing access to clean water and sanitation for all — in line with SDG 6 — at a citywide level is a complex task with a “whole cocktail of factors” standing in the way, Mugo said. The population increases that many cities are experiencing, coupled with the need for services that are resilient to climate-related weather events, add another layer of complexity.

The issue, Mugo said, is that many cities aren’t located near water resources, which means they have to tap into mountains, dams, or lakes further afield. For example, the Sierra Leonean city of Freetown relies on the Guma Dam, located about an hour away by car, for its water supply. Meanwhile, Accra in Ghana gets the majority of its water from the Weija and Kpong reservoirs, which are a few hours’ drive outside the city.

A lack of infrastructure to deliver water can then be a challenge in certain parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Mugo said. “We don’t have institutions that are strong and able to provide our services. We don't have a policy and legal environment that supports businesses and investors to get into that space and be able to provide services,” he added.

According to WSUP, an enabling environment for improved WASH services at the city level means looking at which organizations are accountable for providing services, identifying how the private sector can enter the space, checking for the necessary regulation, and ensuring the prioritization of WASH by the government.

The African Ministers’ Council on Water recently created new pan-African policy guidelines with the aim of helping governments create sanitation policies to enable large-scale sanitation programming. It recommends forming a policy focused on universal access to services, setting specific benchmarks, and conducting field assessments that look into who has access to which services, whether enough money is being invested in those services, and if there’s a monitoring system in place to identify the gaps.

“Before, we used to think it was an issue of providing technology, of providing access, of training people on how to manage small systems. Over the years, we’ve come to realize … the solution is to fix the [government] system,” Mugo said. “Unless we have good policies, good regulations, good laws, strong institutions, and a free market to provide goods and services that the government can provide, then the whole problem will never get resolved.”

Visit the WASH Works series for more coverage on water, sanitation, and hygiene — and importantly, how WASH efforts intersect with other development challenges. You can join the conversation using the hashtag #WASHWorks.