There are no latrines for the
74,000 people who live in their section of Kibera, the biggest slum in Africa,
which lies either side of the main railway line between Nairobi and Mombasa in
the Kenyan highlands.
People there use what, with
dark humour, are called "flying toilets". They defecate in a plastic
bag and then throw it into the street or on to one of the vast dungheaps. Some
just visit the heaps and relieve themselves directly. The heap next to Grace
school is about 20 feet high and the size of a quarter of a football pitch.
The stench is unimaginable.
When it rains, a noxious black liquid runs off the heap, and through the
school, over the dirt floor of the classrooms. It seeps into the drinking water
supply pipes, which run beneath the dump.
There is more to this story
than a piece of prurient poverty pornography. It has a point, which is the one
made more genteelly by the UN's annual Human Development Report, published
tomorrow. For Kibera is but one stark example of what is perhaps the greatest
developmental challenge facing humanity.
More than one billion
peoplelive without clean water. Some 2.6 billion - half of the developing
world's population - lack access to sanitation. The two issues are inextricably
linked, for without proper sanitation pollution of drinking water is almost
inevitable.
At the start of the 21st
century, 5,000 children die every day for want of clean water. That is why, in
the sprawling slum of Kibera, where typhoid and dysentery are rampant, Kevin
Watkins, the chief researcher of the UN report, found that child death rates
run eight times higher even than in the rest of Nairobi.
We know from our own history
that providing sanitation and clean water is the biggest single thing that can
be done for the poor. Dysentery, typhoid and cholera killed as many children in
Manchester and London in early Victorian times as they do in Africa today. The
increasing wealth from industrialisation boosted income, but child mortality
barely changed - until the introduction of sewers. It was the same in New York,
Birmingham and Paris.
Water and sanitation are among
the most powerful preventive medicines available to reduce infectious disease.
The presence of a flush lavatory in a house, the UN report says, reduces the
risk of infant death by more than 30 per cent. Sewers save more lives than
antibiotics. Astonishingly, then - despite one of the Millennium Development
Goals being to halve the number of people without water and sanitation - the
amount of aid to this sector has, according to the Commission for Africa,
fallen by 25 per cent over the past decade.
The problem is twofold. The
first is that such basics are unfashionable among Western donor governments.
The second is that many African and Asian governments do not prioritise the
area; in Ethiopia the military budget is 10 times the water and sanitation
budget; Pakistan spends 47 times more on guns than on sewers and clean water.
Why? Because water and
sanitation are problems which disproportionately affect the poorest, women and
children in particular, - a class which has no political leverage with urban
Third World elites.
Water is about power. The most
striking political example of which, the report shows, is that Israeli settlers
take six times the water from the West Bank as local Palestinians. But there
are countless economic examples. In Ghana the poorest, who use standpipes
provided by private companies, pay treble what the better-off pay for water
piped to their homes. In Kibera they pay five times more. People living in many
of the world's most squalid slums pay more per litre for water than people in
New York and London. The perverse rule operating in water markets is that the
poorer you are, the less you get and the more you pay.
To set aside the financial
resources to fulfil the Millennium Development Goal to halve the number of
people without sustainable access to safe water would cost about $10bn (£5.3bn)
annually over the next decade.
It requires sustained efforts
and specific strategies. General economic development is not enough. It can be
seen by contrasting India - which has a booming economy but no proper targeting
on clean water and sewers - with Bangladesh - which has less growth but
effective water strategies. India's people are becoming wealthier but not
healthier. Some 700 million people there lack adequate sanitation - and in
cities such as Delhi and Mumbai the water systems are collapsing, with rivers
being transformed into fetid sewers. As a result infant mortality is down by
just 22 per cent since 1990, compared with a drop of 40 per cent in much poorer
Bangladesh.
The UN report is full of
examples of strategies that have worked, and those that have not. It cites
success stories in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Vietnam and comparative good news in
South Africa, where water was once a symbol of apartheid division, but a system
of entitlement has been introduced. It should be extended across the world, the
report says, with all governments legislating for water as a human right, with
a basic minimum of 20 litres per person per day - less than half of what we in
Britain each flush daily down the lavatory.
To do that, the report says,
would increase aid spending by about $4bn a year. That is less than Europe
spends on bottled mineral water.
Liquid assets
* The average Briton flushes
50 litres of water down the lavatory each day - ten times what many Africans
have for drinking and washing.
* One in six of the world's
population lacks clean water and one in three lacks proper sanitation - that's
pit latrines, not sewage systems.
* The average European uses
200 litres of water a day compared with less than 20 per person per day in
Africa. (Americans use 400 litres.)
* 1.8 million children under
five die each year from diarrhoea caused by contaminated water.
* Every $1 spent on sewage
saves $8 in lost productivity.
* The $10bn the Millennium
Development Goal needs to halve the number of people without clean water equals
five days of global military spending.