Sanitation, Hygiene, and Water: The Communal Practices and Ideal
This blog post covers the best practices on water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) from an urban planning perspective. The research problem is the neighborhood I was born in (Star). Issues relating to water, wastewater, and solid waste have already been highlighted in previous blogs. A recap is that this neighborhood suffers insufficient water supply, there are no sewerage systems, there is poor drainage thus the stagnation of wastewater and there is no proper solid waste management system. Quite a handful for a geographically small neighborhood?
The obvious strategy would be banking on government officials to act as the funds disbursed to Counties and Constituencies in every financial year allocate budgets for WASH programs, but on the bare minimum, politicians implement in schools, for the sake of publicity and that marks the end of the ‘comprehensive ‘project. As residents of this small neighborhood, neighbors take up the role of cleaning up plastics every fortnight for burning. Water supply while still being a challenge, developers/landlords/landladies have begun investing in buying water from water boozers or rainwater harvesting through reservoirs: just a heads-up, rain is also very scarce on this side of the town, while the whole country was experiencing floods between March-June 2024, we were experiencing moderate rainfall.
This raises concerns about health especially getting water from unknown sources, due to the lack of a better strategy, most developers opt to treat the water using chlorine for safety of consumption. There is also the unconscious practice of recycling water which the residents are now regulars and there is no need to even be sensitized on matters of water recycling. This has mainly been due to the water pressure rather than the conservationist perspective. For extra caution, deworming is also a regular practice on this side of the town.
While there is somehow no control over the stagnation of wastewater on our already-potholed streets, residents are made aware not to make the situation worse by disposing of wastewater onto roads: well, there are still culprits who do but with time with collective responsibility, our neighborhood will be wastewater free during the dry season.
Above is a simple guide on short-term solutions for community initiatives in a strained water and sanitation environment. Happy Planning, Happy Neighborhoods!
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