Description
INTRODUCTION
1.0 BACKGROUND OF STUDY
Water is a precious resource and vital for life. Without it wewould die within
days. Access to a safe and affordable supply of drinking water is universally
recognized as a basic human need for the present generationand a pre-condition
for the development and care of the next. Water is also a fundamental economic
resource on which people’s livelihoods depend. In addition to domestic water
use, households use water for productive activities such as farming and livestock
rearing in rural areas, or horticulture and home-based microenterprises in urban
settlements. Water shortage, poor quality water, or unreliable supply have
profound effects on people’s well-being. Providing safe water alone is not
enough, however, as water can quickly become unsafe, and the faecal–oral
transmission of diseases can occur in other ways. If people do not have adequate
and appropriate sanitation facilities or the chance to develop good hygiene
practices, diseases can be spread through the contamination of water or through
other pathways in the home environment. At any one time around half of all
people in developing countries are suffering from one or more of the six main
diseases associated with inadequate water supply and sanitation: diarrhoea,
ascaris, dracunculiasis, hookworm, schistosomiasis, and trachoma. Improving
the health of the poor is a frequently cited goal of water and sanitation projects.
The relationship is difficult to establish in practice at the project level, but overthe longer term it can be demonstrated that there are significant health-associatedbenefits from improvements in water supply and sanitation provision,
particularly when these are associated with changes in hygiene behaviour.
Every year, millions of the world’s poorest people die from preventable diseases
caused by inadequate water supply and sanitation (WS&S) services. Hundreds
of millions more suffer from regular bouts of diarrhoea or parasitic worm
infections that ruin their lives. Women and children are the main victims.
Burdened by the need to carry water containers long distances every day, they
must also endure the indignity, shame, and sickness that result from a lack of
hygienic sanitation. The impact of deficient water and sanitation services falls
primarily on the poor. Unreached by public services, people in rural and peri-
urban areas of developing countries make their own inadequate arrangements or
pay excessively high prices to water vendors for meagre water supplies. Their
poverty is aggravated and their productivity impaired, while their sickness puts
severe strains on health services and hospitals. Apart from the overwhelming
social arguments, there are also powerful economic and environmental reasons
for improving WS&S services for the poor. Human waste is a major polluter of
rivers and groundwater resources. As water demand rises inexorably with social
and economic progress, scarcity of water becomes a major consideration in
development planning. Industrialization and food security may both be
threatened, unless water resources are protected and conserved. For all these
reasons, improved WS&S services have been seen as a high priority need by th development community for more than 20 years. So why is the suffering and the
squalor virtually unabated in so many countries? There are many reasons, and
the problem is a complex one because solutions depend on a mix of political,
social, technical, and institutional approaches, most of them involving changing
established practices.
While the problem of inadequate water supply and sanitation exists in both rural
and urban areas, the problem is particularly pressing in cities. The water,
sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure of many cities is therefore stressed beyond
current capacity, and infrastructure investments have not kept pace with rapid
and unplanned urbanization.
Urban areas are characterized mainly by lack of basic services such as potable
and safe water, well-laid out drainage system, sewage network, sanitation
facilities and appropriate solid waste disposal. The above led to a focus on the
access on the basic services in urban areas. The focus of this paper is about
understanding the study area and the problem faced in accessing basic services
such as water supply and waste disposal facilities in Oworonshoki.
Slum in most developing countries are characterized by poor infrastructure
facilities such as solid waste disposal, sewage disposal, drainage and water
supply which leads to environmental pollution and in absence of sufficient
number of community toilets, these people are forced to excrete in the
open(Bhardwaj,2007).
The accumulation of garbage in Oworonshoki was found to be a consequence of
lack of dumping sites in the communities, the uncollected garbage often
accumulated and blocked drainage turned the areas messed up and impassable
during the rainy season. Health is an important issue of present time in
Oworonshoki, unhygienic conditions, open defecation system are the major risk
factors to people in the area. Urban Services is primarily focused on water,
sanitation, and hygiene services (WSH), thus, while the broader infrastructural
challenges may take years to be satisfactorily solved, there is scope for
developing interventions that can improve access to WSH services quickly,
efficiently, and cheaply in the short run.
The definition of urban services is very broad and includes the following
three tiers:
Tier 1: Sanitation, Solid Waste, and Drainage
Tier 2: Water, Security, Electricity, and Housing
Tier 3: Education and Health
The tiered definition reflects the ranking and prioritization of the broad set of
urban services for the purposes of this initiative.
1.0.1 WATER, SANITATION AND HYGIENE
To define Water, Sanitation and Hygiene services, we follow Evans (2005):
Hygiene:
i) Safe storage of water;
ii) ii) Safe treatment of foodstuffs;
iii) iii) Safe hand washing practices.
Sanitation:
i) Safe “on–site” collection, storage, treatment and disposal/re-use/recycling of
human excreta; ii) Connection to sewage systems;
iii) Management/re-use/recycling of solid waste;
iv) Collection and management of industrial waste products;
v) Management of hazardous wastes (hospital wastes, chemical/radioactive and
other dangerous substances).
Water Provision and Management:
i) Access to water network–at household, neighbourhood, or local level;
ii) Drainage and disposal/re-use/recycling of household waste water
(“grey water”);
iii) Drainage of storm water;
iv) Treatment and disposal/re-use/recycling of sewage effluents.
Next, we review the current state of service delivery and access for the urban
poor, and lay out some stylized facts about poverty, urbanization, water, and
sanitation.
1.0.2 CURRENT SITUATION IN URBAN SERVICES: THE
URBANIZATION OF POVERTY
Migration from rural to urban areas has increased in the last few decades,
especially in the developing world. The rural poor usually come to large cities
to take advantage of job opportunities and improved living standards not
available in their previous areas of residence (Glaeser 2011).
Moving to cities is also often the primary method of income diversification for
rural agricultural workers (Banerjee & Duflo 2006). Indeed, it can be a very
productive move, even for temporary migrants (Bryan, Chowdhury and
Mobarak 2011).
However, cities and peri-urban centers have often been unprepared to absorb
expanding populations and provide adequate urban services–housing,
sanitation, health, and education, among others–to meet the needs of these
rapidly growing new populations. Consequently, migration has shifted the locus
of global poverty to the cities, a process now recognized as the “urbanization of
poverty” (UN-Habitat 2003a).
In many cities, water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure is stressed beyond
current capacity, and infrastructure investment has not kept pace with rapid and
unplanned urbanization (WaterAid 2007). Temporary and seasonal migrants can
exacerbate the service provision challenge, as these migrants often live in
temporary shelters without improved sanitation, waste disposal or water facilities. They introduce volatility in the slum populations, and are not
integrated into pre-existing social networks, making it more difficult to
introduce community solutions to institutional problems (UN-Habitat 2003a).
Furthermore, this problem of overcrowded cities with inadequate urban services
is getting more serious. From 1975 to 2007, the growth rate of urban populations
in the developing world was 3.35 percent annually–more than three times larger
than the growth of the rural population. In 2007, the world’s urban population
surpassed the rural population.
The urban poor face huge challenges in their daily lives. Almost a billion people
(more than one-third of the urban population), primarily in the developing world,
live in slums. Living conditions in slums are characterized by overcrowding,
high levels of unemployment or underemployment, deficient urban services
(water, sanitation, education, and health), and widespread insecurity, including
violence against women (UN-Habitat 2003b).
The progress achieved in urban service provision has allowed around 200
million people living in cities to gain access to water, sanitation facilities, and
durable housing. As a consequence, from 2000 to 2010, the proportion of urban
residents in developing countries living in slums decreased from 46 percent to
36 percent. However, the progress is still not enough as the number of people
moving to slums is increasing: the proportion of slum dwellers decreased
because the growth of the urban population more than compensated the growth of the slum dwellers. This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa, and Western
and South-eastern Asia.
1.0.3 TWO KEY DEFICIENCIES: SANITATION AND WATER SUPPLY
Access to water and sanitation among the urban poor:
Sanitation coverage is especially low in cities. Despite the fairly flexible and
expansive definition of improved sanitation, such facilities are used by less than
two-thirds of the world population.
A slum dweller is defined as someone who lives in housing with at least one of
the following characteristics:
i) lack of improved sanitation;
ii) lack of improved water supply;
iii) lack of durable housing;
iv) lack of security of tenure, and
v) lack of sufficient living area
(UN-Habitat 2003b).
WHO (2011) defines a sanitation facility as “improved” if the facility is one that
is likely to hygienically separate human excreta from human contact. Improved
sanitation facilities include: flush or pour-flush to piped sewer system, septic
tank or pit latrine, ventilated improved pit latrine, and pit latrine with slab and
composting toilet. However, sanitation facilities are not considered improved
when shared with other households, or open to public use.
There are great disparities across regions regarding sanitation coverage. In the
developed world, access to improved facilities is essentially universal, while in
the developing regions, only around half of the population has access to them.
Among the 2.6 billion people in the world who do not use improved sanitation
facilities, the greatest numbers are in Southern Asia, but there are also large
numbers in Eastern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Significant progress has been
made since 1990 in Northern Africa, South eastern Asia, and Eastern Asia
WHO (2011) defines a drinking water source as “improved” if, by nature of its
construction and design, it is likely to protect the source from outside
contamination, in particular from fecal matter. Improved drinking water sources
include: piped water into a dwelling, plot or yard, public tap/stand pipe, tube
well/borehole, protected dug well, protected spring, and rainwater collection. On
the other hand, unimproved drinking water sources are: an unprotected drug
well, unprotected spring, cart with small tank/drum, tanker truck, surface water
(from a river, dam, lake, pond, stream, canal, irrigation channel and any other
surface water), and bottled water (if it is not accompanied by another improved
source).
Intermittent service, which results in unreliable availability and inadequate
volumes of often contaminated water, causes a large number of households to
store water in household reservoirs, and supplement piped water with water from
tanker operators and water vendors (Water and Sanitation Program 2007).
