# 7- To poo or not to poo

Having explored water wars, transboundary interactions and dam schemes quite a bit, I’d now like to narrow it down and focus more on water management in terms of Namibia’s sanitation, particularly that of its capital city Windhoek. It’ll be interesting to look at a more local rather than international scale and how the politics of sanitation, including the history of power, link back to development. After all, hydropolitics isn't just exclusively about transboundary water systems and the management of dams.

That being said, my interest in researching sanitation stems from something that was mentioned in a recent lecture: ‘Water is life, but sanitation is dignity’. This quote really stuck with me, as it highlights that there is more to water than its life-sustaining functions. In my opinion, having to use degrading methods to relieve oneself is just as serious of a problem as a lack of water availability. Of course these two themes are highly interlinked, making them fall under the same Sustainable Development Goal- number 6.

 

Figure 1.Image of an informal settlement located in Windhoek.

This lack of sanitation can be partially attributed to the city’s colonial legacy and rapid rate of urbanisation. In 2018 alone, 4.5% of Namibia’s rural population migrated to cities, in the hopes of finding employment, access to infrastructure and overall better standards of living. However, instead they were greeted with an unemployment rate of 35% and an unaffordable housing market, leading to the proliferation of several informal settlements. Additionally, resulting from this unplanned urbanisation, nearly 85% of Windhoek’s informal residents do not own the land they live on, which is a non-negotiable prerequisite to be able to access public municipal services. In other words, without land ownership informal settlers cannot actualize their right to the city’s services, including sanitation and clean water.

Thus, the exclusion of informal city dwellers shows that power asymmetry is nothing unfamiliar in Windhoek, particularly when it comes to the relationship between land and municipal services. In the eyes of the state an absence of documentation means an absence of identity, which inherently prohibits informal communities from accessing services of the legal city.

 

A wake up call

However, before Covid-19 was on anyone’s radar, Windhoek was confronted with a completely different virus outbreak: the spread of Hepatitis-E in 2017. With this epidemic it became abundantly clear that Windhoek has a serious sanitation problem that was and still is in need of fixing. 

In response to this realisation a Community-Led Total Sanitation Campaign (CLTS) was introduced by UN Namibia, Ministry of Health and Social Services, City of Windhoek and other international stakeholders. The goal was to eradicate open defecation and encourage a behavioural change within the informal communities, so that ‘sustainable improvements go beyond the provisioning of toilets’. Although the involvement of informal settlers in building their own toilets created a sense of ownership and responsibility, more than this is needed to change the problem of sanitation in Windhoek. This is because groups of society, like women, are unable to visit toilets during the night out of fear of being assaulted, showing how it’s not just a matter of hygiene but also that of social norms.

Figure 2. Inside of a CLTS Hepatitis-E project toilet.

Lastly, it begs to question if this development approach was really as effective as advertised, considering that community leaders still feel as though they have little agency. It also makes me wonder whether shifting the responsibility from the state to its citizens is sustainable or rather a way for the government to escape their duties. After all, even community-led projects require the support of local institutions.