SA Affordable Housing July - August 2019 // Issue: 77 | Page 30

INDUSTRY MATTERS
Sanitation innovation
– the key to Africa's
development strategy
By 2063, Africa will constitute 30% of the global population
with three billion inhabitants, more than doubling the
current population of 1.25 billion.
By Dhesigen Naidoo, Water Research Commission
28
JULY - AUGUST 2019
T
he demographic dividend, new production
revolution, shifting wealth patterns,
accelerated urban transition, climate
change and the green economy are the
megatrends that will influence this continent's
future, claims the latest analysis in the ‘Africa's
development dynamics - growth, jobs and
inequalities’ report, compiled by the African
Union Commission in partnership with the OECD.
With more than double the population, Africa
will have the most youthful population in the
world. What we do now will determine if this
calculates into a demographic dividend or a
demographic burden.
For an already underserviced continent with
respect to basic needs of water, sanitation,
energy, health and nutritional security; the
prospect of a doubling of the population in the
next half century is daunting. We are rapidly
reaching, and in some cases exceeding, the
planetary boundary conditions on the one hand
and have the objective to ensure universal access
to these basic services and facilitating economic
growth on the other.
But as Pliny the Elder (Roman author,
naturalist and natural philosopher), remarks, ‘Ex
Africa semper aliquid novi’ or ‘there’s always
something new coming out of Africa’. Africa can
pioneer global sustainable development, not
despite but precisely because of its current low
industrialisation levels. This means while the
global north must invest in the high cost
retrofitting to switch from the current high
carbon, water intensive, waste producing
economic model; Africa can leapfrog directly into
the sustainable development paradigm.
She already has a wonderful example of this
leapfrogging with mobile telephony which has
provided proliferated access to hundreds of
millions of Africans while saving most of
connected Africa from the eyesore of millions
The Arumloo is one of the various projects the WRC has been
involved in developing a toilet that uses a two-litre flush and is
based on different design principles.
kilometres of high maintenance and aesthetically challenging
overhead telephone wire networks.
Another of the critical domains that has this possibility is
sanitation. The current African backlog, which is primarily in sub-
Saharan Africa, is estimated at 570 million people who don’t yet have
access to improved sanitation, and if we are to achieve the
Sustainable Development Goal for sanitation, this situation must be
reversed by 2030. This is in an environment of increased water
scarcity and although the IMF in its Regional Economic Outlook report
pegs a continued recovery, there is still a low growth rate forecast at
3.5% in 2019.
In addition, this is a region with low energy access and security.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) in its Energy Access Outlook
2017 concluded that 95% of 1.1 billion people without access to
electricity are in sub-Saharan African countries. These are difficult
boundary conditions. It will take high levels of innovation, creativity
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