WASH and Food Security- Challenges and Opportunities for Integrated Management Practice

 Introduction:

Picking up from my previous blog post about the role of institutions in sustainable water and food resource management, this post will explore some of the key interactions between WASH (water and sanitation hygiene) and food security, as well as the importance of an integrated strategy of improving WASH as part of food security in Africa.

Linking Food and water security with sanitation:

Figure 1- Changes in sanitation access in Sub-saharan Africa

Source: (Armah, et al, 2018)

There is a key causal link between WASH and food security, as malnutrition is directly caused by not only lack of food, but also by the spread of disease due to lack of sanitation (WHO, 2015), or drinking faecally-contaminated water, for example. As a result, it is vital to understand that improvements to food security must include an integrated strategy of improving widespread access to sanitation. This is particularly relevant to many of the rapidly expanding urban areas in Africa with poor levels of WASH access and massively dense populations. There are ‘737 million people in Africa without access to sanitation’, and the relative access to sanitation services has actually decreased in many countries over the last 20 years (Nansubuga, 2016), due to the massive continent-wide population growth, without infrastructure being able to keep up. This is shown by Figure 1, where urban sanitation access decreased from 93% to 75% between 2005 and 2015. As a result, diarrheal diseases are a leading cause of death and malnutrition in Africa, accounting for 8% of child deaths and 35% of all children having their growth stunted. Therefore, improving sanitation services is absolutely critical in supporting African nations in meeting their SDG and food security goals.

Challenges and opportunities to integrated water-food-sanitation improvement- 'Sanergy' in Kenya:

As outlined in my previous blog post, the role of public and private institutions in providing infrastructure services is often a complex, contested issue. This is also the case for sanitation services, where ‘institutional environments [often] prevent private or public investment in infrastructure’ (O’Keefe, 2015). However, innovative market-based approaches have been used by social enterprises to improve access to sanitation in informal urban areas, where over half of Kenya’s population live, and where the majority of population growth is occurring. This is particularly important as informal urban areas often receive little to no government-provided services due to unclear land ownership arrangements (O’Keefe, 2015). Sanergy, an MIT-born social enterprise, have significantly improved access to sanitation and waste management in Kampala and Nairobi by producing hundreds of sanitary, accessible toilets. These toilets are managed sustainably through turning human waste into fertiliser, and selling toilets to local entrepreneurs on microfinance loans, who then operate them on a pay-to-use basis. However, despite these improvements, there are significant challenges in scaling up these innovative strategies to meet the needs of hundreds of millions living in informal settlements in African cities, due to the lack of government support and funding that is needed in the construction and management of large-scale infrastructure provision.

Conclusion:

Taking a ‘multisectoral approach’ to addressing issues of WASH and food security is essential to improving both health and food security outcomes in Africa; whilst there are innovative strategies available to improving access to sanitation, institutional issues (similar to that of my last post) are preventing the widespread improvements that are necessary..