Two days in the WASH: Part 1, the basics
Two days in the workshop
During June, I spent two days of vacation allowance (”it is well known that you have an unusual sense of fun,” as an Army buddy says to T. E. Lawrence early in the film) in
It is well known that I have an unusual sense of fun …
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WS&H)
(A neophyte’s definition)
Water. Delivering adequate clean, fresh, drinkable water to a household. Rural solutions range from boreholes and small wells up through expansive piping systems and aqueducts. Urban solutions start with water vendors, through standpipes and in-home taps.
Sanitation. Taking away human evacuation, particularly fecal, from where people deposit it to somewhere it can be biodegraded: a latrine, a composting pile, a leach field, an organic treatment source, or a technological treatment source. Sanitation is distinct from sewer, because sewer is only one way of achieving sanitation, and by far the most capital intensive, so it is seldom the first move in slums.
Hygiene. Teaching people who have never had experience with W&S systems how to use them, how to keep themselves clean and healthy, and how to maintain the system.
Learning how to keep our homes clean
I was eager for the two days because, even as housing is the linchpin of cities, the more I think about slums in the global south, the more housing seems the central node in a network of linkages, of which the most urgent and most integrated is WS&H – a subject, blog readers know, that has been consuming me of late (see my seven-part exploration of the economics of water: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, and extracted essential principles, Part 1 and 2).
Here’s what struck me over the course of two days:
I used my head both days
1. Everybody solves their WS&H problems every day. Water and sanitation are two problems that every one of us solves every day. Every day we drink in enough water to keep us going, and we expel what we consume.
Other than breathing, there are very few things we are certain to do every day. Some days we don’t make money, some days we don’t go to work, some days we don’t travel. Water is every day – for most of us, every few hours.
That enforced frequency means everybody has a standby solution. It may be a crappy solution (literally); it may be unhealthy or dangerous or expensive; it may have rotten externalities (a point to which I’ll return below); but everybody solves it.
If only it were that simple
2. Sanitation’s a bigger problem than water. Around the world, roughly 1 billion people lack ready and affordable access to safe drinking water. Most of these are in Africa, some in South and
Red is bad, green is good
Sanitation’s a bigger problem, with 2.5 billion people lacking access to ‘improved sanitation’
In 2003, the WHO estimated the capital backlog – the non-recoverable infrastructure cost – to connect up all these people was in the vicinity of $100-180 billion.
3. In poor rural areas, WS&H costs zero money. I’m a city dweller; before that, I was a suburbanite; and all my life I’ve lived in developed nations. To me – as, probably to you – water is something that comes out of a faucet, provided cheaply by a utility, and paid in a monthly bill.
Immediate, and clear
Sanitation is clean, white, and ceramic; you just flush your problems away.
Doesn’t that say ‘clean’ to you?
[Actually, not quite. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, the house we lived in for twenty years had a clivus multrum on the ground floor and basement –
Turns out to be very important the pipes go straight vertical
– so I’ve shoveled my share of post-composted shit … but this was a choice and a lark, not an obligation.]
The one in our basement was baby-blue fiberglass
In poor rural environments, you draw water from a water or stream or pond. You pay for it with labor, not money. You evacuate in a latrine or pit or outhouse. You pay for that with labor, not money.
Dig it, reinforce it, use it
Take turns cleaning the latrine
Money enters the picture as people urbanize. Water sellers and pay-per-use toilets are consequences of urban environments.
Hallway at a communal membership and pay-per-use toilet, Dharavi,
4. Hygiene has zero capital cost and high run cost. We sometimes forget – at any rate, I sometimes forget – that hygienic habits are learned, and taught, and that the world is full of children who do not know them and have no means of learning them. Products are great only if people know how to use them.
We’ve seen this in the realm of finance. Savings precedes borrowing; financial literacy is a literacy to be learned and taught. Savings knowledge (what it calls ‘rituals’) is a cornerstone principle for Slum Dwellers International. The same holds true for hygiene.
Pupils with hygiene kits,
In financial terms, hygiene is a service with zero capital cost but an ongoing operating cost. Further, because it’s a soft cost, it tends to get short shrift – we think of the software not the documentation, the car not the service warranty, the toilet not the plumber. When doing the arithmetic, it’s easy to overlook the ongoing cost of hygiene education, and to eliminate it, with the result that the capital cost – the toilet block, latrine, or well – get fouled and fails.
5. There’s a philosophical schism: water as a human right versus water as a money good. Declarations abound that water is a human right – and it ought to be one – but if you take that view, you conclude that all governments should provide WS&H for their people as part of their tax base. And then you hit reality pretty quickly:
It’s up to them …
… whether humanitarian aid gets to these people
If water is a human right, economic discussions go out the window.
Take that, economics!
Water ought to be a human right. Lots of things ought to be human rights.
Until that day, it’s a money good, and economics applies.
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
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