Africa’s fastest-growing cities coming to grips with toilet crisis
- Governments are increasingly depending on private businesses and philanthropic groups to help manage human waste
- Africa’s urban areas contain 472 million people, a number that is expected to double over the next 25 years, according to a 2017 World Bank report
The darkening clouds are ominous for many in the urban neighbourhood of Makindye-Lukuli, promising rushing rainwaters stinking of human waste from overflowing septic tanks.
As Africa faces a population boom unmatched anywhere in the world, millions of people are moving to fast-growing cities while decades-old public facilities crumble under the pressure.
Sewage is a scourge for residents of this community on the outskirts of Uganda’s capital, Kampala. There are no public toilets for some 1,200 people. Mud tinged with faeces washes into homes during heavy rains.
The sanitation crisis echoes that of cities across the developing world. Some 2.5 billion people, most of them in Africa or Asia, lack access to an adequate toilet, United Nations figures show. Governments are increasingly depending on private businesses and philanthropic groups to help manage human waste in cities that were never planned to handle so many people.
One of the fastest-growing cities in the world, Kampala is home to at least 1.5 million people but authorities say over 3 million pass through daily, usually for work. Yet there are fewer than 800 pay toilets and only 14 free ones, many of them dilapidated with walls often smeared with faeces.
Many people rush to malls to relieve themselves. Even in the buildings of government agencies the toilets are often kept under lock and key, apparently to discourage intruders.