Swapo places faith in ‘cheap solutions’ as sanitation sector fails

Shorty Xhuka and his family are San, an indigenous group of people in southern Africa.

Eight years ago, he and 16 members of his family were evicted from the farmland where they had lived and worked as labourers for generations.

Left to survive off Xhuka’s monthly pension of N$1 300, they migrated to Katumba village in north-west Namibia, where they lived under the shade of a tree.

One day in 2019, the government installed a toilet next to Xhuka’s tree. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked.

He was given a dry toilet – a type of toilet that uses no water or chemicals to move waste along. Instead, excrement drops into a tank or bag that must be emptied and cleaned. The lifetime costs of dry toilets are lower than that of flush toilets as they save on water, and some even produce fertiliser from the dried waste. In southern Africa’s driest country, where sewage connections reach just 35% of citizens, they are vital to providing sanitation.

But they do require more work. There’s no water seal to protect from the smell, so things can get ugly quickly without daily cleaning and good ventilation. Every so often, the tank must be emptied. And if the toilet is a pit latrine, then one must dig another hole and move the pot before the next use. There are also things you can’t always put down the hole – such as water – and, like all toilets, sometimes they need fixing.

None of this is obvious, especially if you’ve never used one.

Education is key

In 2012, after visiting Namibia, the United Nations’ (UN) special rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque, outlined that public participation “in the design, implementation and monitoring” of toilet initiatives would be indispensable in providing the country with sanitation. She also warned that the benefits of investing in sanitation would be lost if the government failed to give equal attention to “hygiene promotion and awareness raising on the benefits of safe sanitation”.

Simply put, building toilets would not guarantee their use. People must want to use them, but to create that incentive, many Namibians - who had lacked adequate sanitation for decades - would need to be educated on the benefits and instructed on proper cleaning, maintenance and hygiene.

The government acknowledges this. In fact, its 2008 water supply and sanitation policy outlined that improving sanitation would be achieved by “community involvement and participation.” And yet it appears it has not followed its own guidance.

In 2012, the Namibian government constructed 10 000 dry Ecosan toilets across five northern regions at a cost of N$181.5 million, but many are no longer usable because residents say they were not provided with instruction, promotion, cleaning or maintenance guidance upon installation.

Paulus Mutikisha, the headman for Ekolanaambo, a village in the Oshana Region and one of the beneficiaries in 2012, told Namibian Sun in 2019: “We have never used [the toilets] because we were never trained on how to use them,” adding that some facilities were not installed properly. ”Money has been wasted, and the structures are... falling apart”.

In 2014, many beneficiaries of a scheme that aimed to build 6 500 pit latrines across the country returned to the bush to defecate. Residents of the Coblenz and Okondjatu villages in central Namibia complained about the stench, bemoaning their inability to keep the toilets in good condition. “We only have a few of these dry pit toilets, and as much as they are helpful, we are challenged when it comes to their maintenance,” Unjee Usora told The Namibian.

“At the end of the day, the toilet is filled with faeces.”

User involvement

The latest draft of Namibia’s 2022-2027 national sanitation and hygiene strategy, reviewed by the Centre for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ), accepts that “[u]ser involvement in the choice of sanitation systems and their construction, operation and maintenance [was] limited... [leading] to sanitation facilities not being used, operated or maintained properly”.

Flush or dry, providing sanitation is not just an infrastructure project, and the government is aware of this too. It was the duty of the ministry of agriculture, water and land reform to organise “the training of communities on operation and maintenance,” according to the government’s 2010-2015 national sanitation and hygiene strategy. The ministry of health and social services, meanwhile, was responsible for conducting “hygiene education in rural areas and informal settlements”.

But this doesn’t appear to have happened.

In fact, according to the latest draft of the 2022-2027 strategy, the agriculture ministry and ministry of urban and rural development alone built 20 230 sanitation facilities between 2009 and 2019, yet “no community involvement and participation or sanitation hygiene promotion activities were incorporated”.

During those 10 years, open defecation dropped by just 2.7% nationwide, while sanitation levels in urban areas actually declined.

CCIJ asked Dr Elijah Ngurare, the agriculture ministry’s deputy executive director for water affairs, why Namibia failed to engage communities in training and operation or to run a national campaign promoting hygiene.

He said: “Sanitation challenges have been acknowledged and government has now decided to scale up the process... construction, maintenance and rehabilitation is going to be the norm. This includes both rural urban and rural sanitation”.

But the government has made implementing such strategies as complicated as possible. Rather than centralising responsibility for improving sanitation, six ministries, regional councils and local authorities have each been tasked with its delivery: The agriculture, health, urban and rural development, education, environment and gender ministries each have funding for sanitation in their budgets.

Meanwhile, local authorities – partly funded by central government – are responsible for providing sanitation in urban areas, including informal settlements, and the ministry of work and transport is responsible for developing new and managing existing wet sanitation systems.

Difficult to monitor

This division of duties and funding makes it especially difficult to monitor and track investment in sanitation, as well as Namibia’s adherence to the 2015 Ngor declaration, in which the government promised to annually commit a minimum of 0.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) to sanitation and hygiene from 2020 onward.

The latest version of the 2022-2027 sanitation and hygiene strategy acknowledges that the government and local authorities "do not have a clear budget line for sanitation... As a result, the sanitation budget is... difficult to track".

Matheus Shuuya, water, sanitation, and hygiene specialist at Unicef Namibia, saidd this contributed to poor coordination of the sanitation sector, something the government admitted in its fifth National Development Plan.

"The sector is... not playing together,” he explained, adding he was desperate to see the Namibian government develop a separate sanitation budget so that it could monitor funding moving forward.

The consequences of insufficient governance are evident in surveying the Namibian landscape. Damaged, disused and derelict government toilets can be found across the country. Often, they are filthy beyond use, blocked by newspaper or filled with excrement, and a considerable number no longer function.

Cutting corners

At a time when sanitation is in desperate need of a dedicated, coordinated and potentially more costly approach, those in the private sector say the government has complicated their efforts to provide more sustainable options.

Eline van der Linden is the executive director of Omuramba Impact Investing, the sole distributor of a dry toilet called the Enviro Loo.

Unlike the ventilated pit latrines preferred by the government, her toilets reduce odour by separating waste from urine and are built with a closed container that prevents groundwater pollution. Crucially, she also offers user and maintenance training upon installation - including refresher courses on cleaning and maintenance with locals who can then charge the community a fee for their services as cleaners or janitors.

But the technology and training comes at a higher price tag, which is why Van der Linden no longer bids on government tenders. Her cost simply exceeds government specifications.

“[The government] thinks cheap solutions will last,” she said, adding that she has never seen training included as part of a tender.

“When they do put dry toilets down, they do it without any additional effort... No toilet system will work without educating communities on daily cleaning.”

But while Van der Linden’s toilets are more expensive, a sanitation crisis also comes at a cost.

Namibia’s health minister Dr Kalumbi Shangula told CCIJ that inadequate access to sanitation was leading to sickness and infection, while the risk of disease and pollution also threatens tourism and agricultural industries.

“There’s a need to establish what the cost of inaction is,” Shuuya added. “Perhaps the decision-makers don’t have the evidence to say ‘this is what we’re losing out on by not investing in sanitation’.”

But while the full cost of Namibia’s crisis is unknown, it is clear the government has significant work to do to address it in a timely manner.

A weak defence

By the government’s own admission, sanitation has stalled in recent years, and the various ministries tasked with improving it have each failed to prioritise the sector.

The urban and rural development ministry, for example, has failed to hit its toilet targets in four of the last five years.

In 2021, the ministry promised to construct 10 000 new toilets in rural areas, but built only 980 before claiming the original target was “erroneously indicated” and that 1 000 was the real target.

In explaining the failure to meet even the 1 000 toilets target, urban and rural development ministry said “late submission of activity plans and accountability reports from the regions result[ed] in late approval of budgets”.

And 14 years ago, the government outlined plans – with input from four ministries, local authorities and the Office of the Prime Minister – to stimulate "behavioural change” with a national hygiene campaign. This was supposed to happen by 2015, yet Namibia has still not had a nationwide campaign to promote both sanitation and hygiene.

The agriculture ministry, charged with the coordination of government sanitation services, admitted via email to CCIJ that challenges in improving sanitation included “poor sanitation practices and the non-involvement of communities”, but said limited access to water, resources and finance remained a hindrance.

This while vast sums have been allocated to the ministries responsible for sanitation.

Whether those funds are actually spent on sanitation is a matter of priority, and, in 2022, the agriculture ministry cut its water supply and sanitation coordination budget by 72.7%.

Ngurare admitted that “most funding earmarked for water and sanitation in the last couple of years had unfortunately been redirected to the Neckartal Dam”, Namibia’s largest dam that supports a large irrigation scheme in the south.

Shangula also blamed a lack of funds, arguing low tax revenues prevented Namibia from prioritising sanitation.

“You can only [improve sanitation] if you have money, and we don’t have enough for it,” he said. “The economic base of Namibia is very small.”

But, again, it may just be an issue of prioritisation.

‘Incorrect’ comparison

In recent years, the lion’s share of Namibia’s health budget allocation has been spent on curative rather than preventative services, with little left for projects that could promote sanitation and hygiene.

And while Namibia may have a narrow tax base, according to the World Bank, it generates more tax revenue per capita than Botswana, Lesotho and almost as much as Zambia, three countries in southern Africa with better sanitation coverage than Namibia.

Shangula denied that other countries in the region were performing better than Namibia – with lower defecation rates and better access to sanitation – despite being presented with data that ran counter to his claim.

“Botswana has a similar setup with Namibia... they are struggling with the same issues we are,” he said. “I don't think that comparison is correct.”

While Botswana also struggles with poor informal settlements, sparsely populated rural areas, water scarcity and an arid climate, according to the World Health Organisation and Unicef’s joint monitoring programme, 80% of its citizens have access to at least basic sanitation, more than double that of Namibia.

Even at the highest levels of government, a lack of familiarity with the data is not uncommon. In Namibia’s preparatory meeting notes to the UN ahead of the 2023 water conference, the government claimed 46% of rural communities have access to “safely managed sanitation”, but Namibia’s own census mapping report - published in the same year – states that less than 27% of Namibians in rural areas have such access.

Agriculture minister Calle Schlettwein, who attended the conference in New York, declined to comment on the discrepancy.

Eleven years ago, De Alberqueque said Namibia’s sanitation deficit was not a result of a lack of finances, but a “lack of a common vision”, “prioritisation” and an “absence of effective coordination among the different ministries and between central and local government”.

In 2023, these are still the biggest obstacles to improving sanitation.

But where the government has fallen short in reaching its stated sanitation goals, others are now stepping in. However, urbanisation and climate change are pushing back, escalating a crisis that threatens more death, disease and contamination in the next decade.

*Namibia’s rural development and coordination budget drop was calculated using Vote 17 found in government accountability reports from 2019-2020 and 2021-2022.

This report was produced by CCIJ, a non-profit organisation that brings together investigative reporters, visual storytellers and data scientists to investigate key global issues affecting underserved communities. It was supported by the Pulitzer Centre. Part three will be published on Friday.