Strategic guidelines for improving water and sanitation services in Nairobi’s informal settlements

Strategic guidelines for improving water and sanitation services in Nairobi’s informal settlements. Water and Sanitation Program, 2009. (pdf, full-text)

Here the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) introduces the work achieved by the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company (NCWSC) and the Athi Water Services Board (AWSB) and their guidelines for water supply and sanitation interventions in informal settlements.

The document starts with an overview of the situation of Nairobi and its informal settlements. Then, technical options for water supply, sanitation, drainage as well as the development of technical capacity and appropriate standards are suggested, along with financial and management options. Finally guiding principles are presented. These include for instance: social, economic and financial principles, institutional and management arrangements, and working with stakeholders.

Experts Probe Links Between Urban Growth and Climate Change in Africa

A new project has united researchers exploring the connection between rapid urban growth in Africa and climate related emergencies, in an effort to safeguard vulnerable urban populations from the effects of climate change.

The Climate Change and Adaptation in Africa program, or CCAA, aims to increase the capacity of African people and organizations to cope with the effects of climate change.

Sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Center and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, the project hopes to indentify strategies to help the urban poor in Africa’s largest cities to adapt to challenges posed by the changing environment, says project manager Francois Gasengayire.

“The program supports research that helps reduce poverty by improving the environment. And the goal is to harness the capacity of the poor to reduce environmental degradation as it relates to natural disasters, and enhance the use of natural resources for food, water, and income generation,” he said.

Gasengayire says program organizers sought out proposals from across Africa for research projects exploring the links between urban growth and climate change. The researchers, who have assembled in Dakar, represent a range of institutions working with the diverse climate-related issues facing urban areas throughout Africa.

Gasengayire said that an increase in disasters caused by climate change is likely to be felt most acutely in Africa’s urban centers.

“There is a kind of link, and at the same time a vicious cycle between poverty, urban poverty, and environmental burdens,” he said.

Experts say the effects of climate change are already being felt across the continent, and fear that incidences of flooding and drought, and the frequency and intensity of severe storms, will continue to increase in coming decades. Gasingayire says recent shifts in familiar weather patterns, caused by climate change, have made traditional agriculture across Africa less profitable, and driven Africans from rural areas to cities in unprecedented numbers.

The resulting population growth of urban centers, in turn, places stress on natural resources, such as arable land, natural fuels, and fresh water supplies, according to Liqa Raschid-Sally, program manager in Ghana and Ethiopia for Sri Lanka based International Water Management Institute.

“When you move water from agriculture to cities, you can also have an aggravation of the situation in the rural area, or the suburban area, affecting the city, and so there are a lot of issues around this rural-urban interface which could be aggravated by climate change and therefore also affect the cities,” she said.

Sally says increasing numbers of poor migrants to an urban area also heavily tax infrastructure, placing higher demand on already inadequate water and sanitation systems, and creating a challenge for urban planners. She says her work is aimed at giving policy makers some tools to employ in their planning.

“The approach is to try to have a science-based decision tool to help policy makers and planners, decision makers at the city level essentially, to address these questions,” she added.

Such policy tools are necessary because the urban poor have fewer resources to adapt to climate change, and are extremely vulnerable to natural disasters, says University of Ghana researcher Samuel Nli Andey, describing an urban settlement outside Accra.

“The problem is you have this huge migrant settlement, which is located on a flat plain, these areas experience floods on a normal basis, every year there are floods, and we think this is going to increase. And once it increases it is going to affect the lives of the people there,” he said.

Andey says his research will focus on surveying houses in the effected zones, and studying the anticipated responses to flooding. He says the problems caused by flooding are likely to worsen as new residents move into flood plains around Accra.

In 2008, floods struck several countries in West Africa, including Ghana, Liberia, and Senegal, and caused significant damage in Accra. Ghanaian officials and urban planners blamed overbuilding in low-lying, flood prone areas for exacerbating the damage caused by the disaster.

Source – Cutting Edge News

Umande Trust – Communal biogas latrines in Nairobi

The visionary architect Buckminster Fuller believed that a single design could save the world. That ethos is being carried forward by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, which every year holds a contest to create a design with maximum social impact; the winner gets a seed grant of $100,000. Below is information on one of the competition finalists.

Finalist – Umande Trust, GOAL Ireland Partnership

60% of Nairobi’s population lives in slums which are characterized by inadequate housing and sanitation conditions. Human waste lies on paths and drains and an average of 650 people share each toilet cubicle. The most prevalent childhood sicknesses and 40% of infant mortality are caused by inadequate sanitation. To address this, Umande Trust, a Kenyan rights-based organization, has developed the BioCentre concept. This is a biogas generating latrine block, managed by community groups, which can be located anywhere in a slum as it treats human waste in-situ without requiring sewerage infrastructure.

It comprises of the following:
• Digester: Mixes water and human waste in anaerobic conditions to make biogas; remaining liquid effluent is 90% pathogen free and filtered on site.
• BioGas: Used for cooking and can be linked to children’s feeding projects. It reduces carbon emissions by converting methane to CO2 and water and by substituting the need for other fuels.
• Toilets and washrooms: Ground floor to ensure disabled access with free ‘child only’ cubicles
• Water Kiosk: selling affordable clean water
• Upper Floors: Maximizes restricted urban space, has a hall and ancillary rooms for community and livelihoods activities eg cottage industries or restaurant.

Income generated through rental can subsidize the operation of the toilets. The BioCentre can be built with locally available technology, local unskilled labor and requires minimal maintenance as it has no movable parts. GOAL, an international NGO working with Umande, adds value to the BioCentre concept by linking it to a comprehensive community mapping analysis which highlights specific locations in greatest need of improved sanitation and by incorporating in each BioCentre a room for a community health worker. These are community members, trained by GOAL to disseminate hygiene and health information, e.g. to women queing for water each day, and to make referrals to local institutions for health, HIV/AIDS and child protection issues. Most other initiatives offering sanitation services are plot-based pit latrines which are exhaust human waste into nearby rivers, regularly overflow and often charge high usage fees. The BioCentre is a breakthrough, as it treats human waste in-situ, offers affordable sanitation through its mechanism of subsidizing operational costs, reduces carbon emissions and links to hygiene promotion, health and child protection services.

Describe the current stage of your initiative and your implementation plan over the next three years
Umande Trust has so far completed 12 BioCentres in Kenya. They are scattered amongst various communities and have a verifiable local impact. The Umande Trust, GOAL Ireland partnership aims to achieve a community level impact by focusing on the whole of one Nairobi settlement, Mukuru (population 185,000).

Currently the initiative is completing a participatory urban appraisal on water, sanitation, waste management and drainage. This has highlighted inadequate sanitation as the most pressing need and recommends addressing this by:
• increasing the number of affordable, sustainable, community-managed latrine blocks
• increasing the number of plot-based latrines and improving the quality of existing ones
• developing a community sanitation fund as a self-propagating mechanism for scaling up the intervention

Over the next 3 years, the project aims to reach a critical mass of 20 BioCentres which will serve 12,000 daily users. Each BioCentre will donate 10% of its profits to a community sanitation fund, and this will generate over 10,000 USD per year. This fund will be used to scale up the project through providing leverage to attract Government Decentralized Funding (government allocations to local development initiatives) to develop 2 further BioCentres each year which will then also contribute 10% of profits to the fund. The fund may alternatively support the construction and upgrading of 50 ventilation-improved plot-based latrines each year through partnership with small-scale service providers. These will have lined pits to enable them to be emptied by mobile latrine exhausters into sump tanks which will link to the city sewerage network.

Additional information and photos

Stanford University – Seeking solutions to sanitation crisis in Dar Es Salaam

Stanford Report, April 22, 2009 – Seeking low-cost solutions to sanitation crisis in Africa

Each year, diarrhea kills an estimated 1.8 million people worldwide. More than 90 percent of the victims are children younger than 5 in developing countries. What makes the problem especially tragic is that it seems so preventable.

Diarrhea usually results from drinking water contaminated with human feces, coming in contact with a person with poor personal hygiene or exposure to a contaminated surface. About 1 billion people lack access to adequate freshwater supplies, and approximately 2.8 billion do not have access to basic sanitation, so the problem is particularly daunting.

Enter Jenna Davis and Alexandria Boehm of Stanford University. In 2006, Davis, an authority on sanitation in the developing world, and Boehm, an expert on microbial contamination in freshwater and coastal environments, were awarded a two-year Environmental Venture Projects grant from Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment to find solutions to the problem of diarrhea-related deaths among children in Africa.

The focus of the study is Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania. Historically, residents of the peri-urban communities surrounding Dar have relied on water from surface sources or shallow wells that are in close proximity to household pit latrines. “That means when people defecate, the waste stays under the house,” said Davis, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and a fellow at the Woods Institute. “As a result, those shallow wells are very vulnerable to microbial contamination.”

To address the situation, city water and sanitation officials have drilled a series of bore wells that tap into clean aquifers deep below the surface. High-quality water is then pumped into storage tanks connected to sets of four to six taps. “Most of the water from the bore wells meets the World Health Organization guidelines for E. coli bacteria in drinking water,” said Boehm, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. “Concentrations are typically less than 1 bacterium per 100 milliliters water.”

For a little money, residents can go to the taps and carry clean water back to their homes. Many people use the bore-well water for cooking and drinking. But so far, there has been little improvement in their overall health. City water officials want to know why and have turned to the Stanford team for answers.

Household surveys
In the summer of 2008, Davis, Boehm and a team of Stanford students and postgraduates traveled to Dar to study 300 households over a 10-week period. The research team hired Tanzanian enumerators to conduct surveys and interact directly with the households. The enumerators visited each household four times. On the first visit, they collected behavioral information, primarily from female heads of households (“the mothers”), and tested stored water and the hands of family members for indicators of fecal contamination.

Approximately 7,000 water and hand samples were collected during the study. Laboratory analysis revealed very high levels of bacterial contamination on the hands and in the stored drinking water of study participants, even though the deep bore-well water collected at the source was generally of good quality.

“There appears to be something in the transport and storage that is contaminating the water,” Davis explained. “It’s probably happening when people use their fecal-contaminated hands to scoop water out of their home containers. Another possibility is that the stored water containers used for fetching water are not cleaned regularly.”

A major challenge facing many households is distance. Some homes are 200 yards from the clean tap water, and a typical water container weighs 44 pounds when full. “We know that when people haul water from a distance, the first thing they do is drink it, then they cook, and then they wash their kids, themselves and sometimes their animals,” Davis said. “So they may not have enough water for adequate personal hygiene.”

For the second round of visits, the researchers separated the households into four groups. Each group was given generic information about how germs are spread through the five F’s—feces, flies, field, food and fingers. “We used pictures showing several ways to prevent the spread of germs, such as boiling or chlorinating the water,” Davis explained. “One of the four groups received only the generic information. A second cohort got the generic information plus the results of their water test. The third cohort got the generic information and their hand test results. The fourth group got everything—generic information, the water test results and the hand test results. The idea builds on basic health behavior-change theory: The more tailored and less generic the message is, the more effective it should be at motivating change.”

‘More is not better’
The preliminary results were surprising. Groups that received hand data or water data alone seemed to have a more positive response than households that got both hand and water test results. “It turns out that more is not better,” Davis said. “Even though we spent an equal amount of time discussing water-related strategies and hand hygiene-related strategies, there was a bigger behavioral change on the hand hygiene side than on the water side.”

The researchers are in the process of finalizing the survey data from their Environmental Venture Project. Meanwhile, in September 2008, Davis and her colleagues were awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant to expand the number of households and the length of the study. “We’re aiming for a full year, which would allow us to monitor behaviors in both the dry and wet seasons,” she said. Data collection will begin in mid-2009, and the results could lead to low-cost solutions that reduce the incidence of diarrhea for tens of millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa and throughout the developing world.

Other members of the Stanford research team are Gary Schoolnik, professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology; Abby King, professor of health research and policy and of medicine; and Cynthia Castro, research associate at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

Mark Shwartz is communications manager at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford.

Source – Stanford University News

India – Indoor air quality assessment in and around urban slums of Delhi city

Indoor Air. 2008 Dec;18(6):488-98.

Indoor air quality assessment in and around urban slums of Delhi city, India.

Kulshreshtha P, Khare M, Seetharaman P. Department of Resource Management, Institute of Home Economics, Delhi University, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, India.

The present study aims at investigating the indoor air quality (IAQ) in selected households in one of the urban slums i.e. the Nizamuddin slums in Delhi, the capital city of India. The study includes investigations and assessments on associated health effects on the occupants living in inefficiently designed houses having poor ventilation. The monitoring of indoor air pollutants e.g. the respirable suspended particulate matter RSPM), the carbon dioxide (CO2), the carbon monoxide (CO), the sulphur dioxide (SO2) and the nitrogen dioxide (NO2) for all three seasons i.e. summer (April-June 2004), rainy (July-September 2004) and winter (December 2004-February 2005) have been conducted. In addition, the spirometry tests on the occupants, particularly the womenfolk and children have been performed to determine the incidence of acute respiratory infections (ARI). Questionnaire survey has also been conducted in the households during the study period to investigate the sick building syndrome (SBS). The study reveals maximum concentration of indoor air pollutants in households during winters (December 2004-February 2005) associated with aggravated espiratory problems like cough, phlegm, wheezing, and breathlessness among occupants particularly the women occupants. Besides, decrement in lung function indices (i.e. FVC and/or FEV1) due to increased oncentrations of RSPM and CO2 indoors during winter period has also been observed in the women respondents. The study concludes that women and children indoors are most vulnerable to respiratory problems compared to other sexes. A high SBS score is observed in these ‘urban poor’ households because of inadequate ventilation.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: ‘High indoor airborne pollutants during winter are associated with respiratory problems for women and children in houses in urban slum in Delhi. The work demonstrated the need of further studies of indoor air quality for the ‘urban poor’ in developing countries.’

Kenya – Nairobi is a cholera time bomb waiting to explode

Nairobi – Cholera time bomb waiting to explode

Nairobi is a cholera nightmare waiting to happen as thousands of residents buy their food off the streets from unregulated vendors and kiosks, a Nation survey shows.

The dietary habits of residents have also changed; many have stopped preparing and cooking their own food and have turned to roadside fare, often prepared under suspicious hygienic conditions.

Last week, the Red Cross warned of a possible cholera outbreak in Nairobi as people who had travelled upcountry over the Easter holidays — some to areas already hit by the disease — start settling back into the city estates.

Water, an important component in maintaining personal hygiene and a major ally in controlling cholera, is being rationed in parts of Nairobi with health authorities having no capacity to provide alternative water in case of an outbreak.

One of the measures that have proved effective in checking the spread of the disease in smaller rural towns is the banning of food hawking and illegal roadside kiosks, but this may not be possible in Nairobi’s estates considering the vast number of informal ready-to-eat food outlets.

Informal food stalls or “mama pima githeri” eateries as they are popularly known, and roadside open air food outlests are now the only affordable places for poor and middle income Nairobi residents.

These are to be found on every street corner, near bus stops, in the neighbourhood, the local market and even next to open sewers. But they have two things in common — affordability and poor or no hygiene.

According to a Nation survey carried out in several city estates, cost is the most important factor on where and when to get a meal.

Githeri, a boiled mixture of maize and beans, usually doled out in tea cups and selling for between Sh10 and Sh15, is the most popular food for dinner.

Madondo, boiled beans and chapati at about Sh20 and mandazi with tea for breakfast for Sh10 are some of the popular choices but the majority opt for one meal a day.

Other foods like chips, vegetables, samosas, sweet potatoes and fruit are mainly considered as luxuries to be had on special occasions or in case of a windfall.

Elsewhere in Viwandani and Kawangware, one can get a meaty meal from a cow’s head or lower part of the leg for Sh10.

At Kamae Village, behind Nairobi West shopping centre, residents live on the undesirable parts from a local pig slaughtering factory traded at Sh10 a meal.

According to Emmah Waigwe, or Mama Jonte to her clients in Dandora, she has been making take-away githeri for seven years and does not know any other source of income. She wondered why we were talking about cholera yet she has not heard a single complaint from her customers for the last seven years.

But the bottom line is to keep the price down, no matter what happens to the economy. When the price of charcoal goes up alternatives such as sawdust, waste paper and firewood are used, oblivious of the health and environmental consequences.

To speed up the cooking of dry cereals and save on fuel, some outlets have been accused of rusing sodium carbonate, magadi, which in not good for the health.

The informal food sector, which started as a service for construction workers in the 1990s, has now blossomed into a big industry, giving a full new meaning to outside catering.

Fuelled by demand created by poverty, the issue of human health is rarely factored in, with the take-aways attracting all from the Jua kali sector to white collar workers.

Mama Jonte, who says her services are in great demand as she serves over 500 portions per day, scoffed at a possible ban.

“It would not work. The caterers would simply go underground and our hungry customers would follow us.”

The city council is aware of the problem of roadside food sales in Nairobi as its askaris collect Sh25 per day or bi-weekly depending on the market location.

While proprietors may not be required to have running water and toilet facilities because these are mainly take-away places, they are expected to have a food handling health certificate and appropriate dressing including aprons, but this is hardly the case.

They are also supposed to have a portable water source, which is rarely evident.

While several of the businesses claim to observe high hygienic standards, this has often been found to be untrue.

A study presented at the annual Kenya Agricultural Research Institute scientific conference last year concluded that roadside food outlets in Nairobi are a health threat.

Carried out in Kangemi and Korogocho estates in Nairobi by Dr M Oyunga-Ogubi, it said that almost half of the residents in these areas lived on street food despite the fact that they had “…been prepared in poor hygienic conditions and could be of little nutritional value.”

“A whole one-fifth of the population in the two estates was found to be consuming street food on a daily basis and most of the rest for about five days in a week,” says Dr Oyunga-Ogubi.

Consequently any blanket ban on such foods for whatever reason could lead to serious social disruptions.

Similar study

An earlier, but similar study carried out in Dandora and Korogocho estates in 2001 demonstrates how poverty has changed feeding habits in Nairobi in less than a decade.

The study, carried out by the universities of Nairobi and Wageningen of the Netherlands and published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, concluded that street foods in Nairobi were only taken for breakfast or as snacks while dinner was usually home-made.

In such a case, if a health-related ban was initiated residents could tolerably survive.

Another popular food item in the city is the omena or dagaa fish that find its way into Nairobi from the lake region.

Last year, researchers from Kenyatta University, the Department of Fisheries and the Kenya Medical Research Institute in a study published in the East African Medical Journal found Omena to be highly contaminated with some organisms that can cause serious food poisoning such as E.coli and Salmonella.

Not new

They said contamination could occur during storage, transportation and sale at open-air markets.

Such findings are not new to Kenyan health authorities. In July, a report by the ministry of Health said 50 per cent of preventable diseases in Kenya are the result of poor hygiene mainly because of appalling lapses in the country’s environmental sanitation system.

Currently, the Nairobi City Council has about 200 health officers with the daunting task of protecting more than three million residents — and visitors — by inspecting more than 1,500 licensed eating places and several other hundred illegal ones.

Ministry of Health officials say that regulation of unhygienic and illegal food outlets does not form a major part of their job description.

Source – The Nation

Ethiopia – Determining Feasible Water and Feces Management Small Doable Actions for HIV Programs

USAID Hygiene Improvement Project, 2009. Trials of Improved Practice: Determining Feasible Water and Feces Management Small Doable Actions for HIV Programs in Ethiopia. (pdf, 480KB)

Diarrheal disease is the most common opportunistic infection in people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in resource limited settings. Diarrhea is very debilitating and negatively affects the PLWHA’s quality of life. Household members and especially children are at risk of contracting diarrhea from PLWHA suffering from bouts of diarrhea. Improving water, hygiene, and sanitation (WASH) helps prevent diarrhea in PLWHA and their households and enhances the quality of life. The major challenge is how to integrate WASH into HIV programs.

To address this challenge, USAID/HIP worked with NGOs providing home-based care services in Ethiopia to design and carry out a trial of improved practices (TIPs) to help identify the water, hygiene, and sanitation small doable actions (SDA) to be integrated into HIV programs. A rapid assessment was carried out in Amhara Region in December 2007. The SDA were reviewed with NGOs partners in Addis to identify the WASH behaviors to be explored in the TIPs. Water and feces management were the two areas that required more information and were thus selected for the TIPs. Further, despite the high risk of HIV transmission associated with menstrual blood, very little is known about HIV-positive women’s hygiene practices during menstruation. To fill this gap, USAID/HIP also included this topic in the TIPs.

For seven weeks trained data collectors and home-based care workers visited 62 PLWHA in Adama, Addis, Alemtena, and Wonji—urban, peri-urban, and rural sites in the Oromo Region.

USAID/HIP reviewed the findings from the Oromo and Amhara regions and developed recommendations on the WASH SDA to be integrated in the home-based care programs in Ethiopia.

Uganda – Home management of malaria in urban children

Lancet. 2009 Apr 9.

Home management of malaria with artemether-lumefantrine compared with standard care in urban Ugandan children: a randomised controlled trial.

Staedke SG, Mwebaza N, Kamya MR, Clark TD, Dorsey G, Rosenthal PJ, Whitty CJ.

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK.

BACKGROUND: Home management of malaria-the presumptive treatment of febrile children with antimalarial drugs-is advocated to ensure prompt effective treatment of the disease. We assessed the effect of home delivery of artemether-lumefantrine on the incidence of antimalarial treatment and on clinical outcomes in children from an urban setting with fairly low malaria transmission.

METHODS: In Kampala, Uganda, 437 children aged between 1 and 6 years from 325 households were randomly assigned by a computer-generated sequence to receive home delivery of prepackaged artemether-lumefantrine for presumptive treatment of febrile illnesses (n=225) or current standard of care (n=212). Randomisation was done by household after a pilot period of 1 month. After randomisation, study participants were followed up for an additional 12 months and information on their health and treatment of illnesses was obtained by use of monthly questionnaires and household diaries, which were completed by the participants’ carers. The primary outcome was treatment incidence density per person-year. Analysis of the primary outcome was done on the modified intention-to-treat population, which included all participants apart from those excluded before data collection. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT00115921.

FINDINGS: Eight participants in the home management group and four in the standard care group were excluded before data collection; therefore, the primary analysis was done in 217 and 208 participants, respectively. The home management group received nearly twice the number of antimalarial treatments as the standard care group (4.66 per person-year vs 2.53 per person-year; incidence rate ratio [IRR] 1.72, 95% CI 1.43-2.06, p<0.0001), and nearly five times the number given to children with microscopically confirmed
malaria in a comparable cohort of children (4.66 per person-year vs 1.03 per person-year, IRR 5.19, 95% CI 4.24-6.35, p<0.0001). Clinical data were available for 189 children in the home management group and 176 in the control group at study end; the main reasons for exclusion were movement out of the study area or
loss to follow-up. The proportion of participants with parasitaemia at final assessment in the intervention group was lower than in the control group (four [2%] vs 17 [10%], p=0.006), but there were no other differences in standard malariometric indices, including anaemia. Serious adverse events were captured
retrospectively. One child died in each group (home management-severe pneumonia and possible septicaemia; standard care-presumed respiratory failure).

INTERPRETATION: Although home management of malaria led to prompt treatment of fever, there was little effect on clinical outcomes. The substantial over-treatment suggests that artemether-lumefantrine provided in the home might not be appropriate for large urban areas or settings with fairly low malaria transmission. FUNDING: Gates Malaria Partnership.

India – Public wells turn into garbage dumps

CHENNAI: Many public wells in the southern suburbs of Chennai, once the most important source of drinking water for hundreds of residents, are now a picture of neglect with several of them becoming mini garbage dumping yards.

Long before piped water supply, public fountains or street corner tanks became popular, such wells were the only source of water for consumption and cooking. But today, civic bodies have ignored these crucial amenities that perennially supplied pure water.

Some of the wells are nothing more than garbage mounds with residents and traders conveniently using them to dispose of refuse from houses and shops. A case in point is that of the public well on Sengani Amman Koil Street in Madipakkam. About ten years ago, when the State government gave a major impetus to rainwater harvesting, the well was one of those selected by the Kancheepuram district administration as a “roadside rainwater harvesting structure.”

Residents of Sengani Amman Koil Street and Kakkan Street recalled that the well, from which they were drawing water for several years, was developed impressively on its selection as a roadside rainwater harvesting structure. As a result, the level and quality of water improved.

Over the years, the maintenance of the well was not done properly, resulting in the well becoming a garbage dumping pit. Even accumulation of garbage several feet above the well’s surface has not prompted the Madipakkam panchayat administration to react, residents complained.

A public well near the Sembakkam bus stop is in ruins, another behind the market near New Colony in Chromepet is no better. A public well on Velachery Main Road in Selaiyur that was used by a few hundred families was filled up by the State Highways Department in July last year following a court order.

While there are still some wells from which people continue to draw water, including one near the East Tambaram bus stand, many of the facilities were nothing more than an eyesore, say residents. In areas where elaborate and foolproof supply of drinking water through pipelines is absent, public wells and hand pumps could help bridge the gap, but for that to happen local bodies should accord them priority, said K.Santhosh, a Madipakkam resident.

Source – The Hindu

Kenya – Food crisis hits urban poor hard

The urban poor are the most affected by the current food crisis, according to the Kenya Food Security Update survey that says the highest number of people likely to starve are low-income earners in urban informal settlements.

The report says 4.1 million people living in Nairobi and Mombasa slums are threatened by starvation because of reduced earnings resulting from loss of employment after the post-election violence.

The situation is expected to worsen as the long rains are yet to reach most parts of the country, especially Rift Valley Province which is considered the country’s grain basket. Manual labourers, security guards, domestic and office support staff are the most affected.

“We are forced to skip meals to reduce the cost of living,” said Nairobi resident Janeth Akinyi. The 39-year-old mother of four, who sells paper bags at the new Muthurwa market, said her income was grossly inadequate.

“I get about Sh150 daily and this can only pay rent,” she said. A Nation survey found that some workers were skipping lunch because of the high cost of food.

Chips for lunch

“I can not afford food and drinks,” said Mr Jackson Olulu, a clerk at the Nairobi City Council, when asked how he planned to celebrate Easter. Most workers have resorted to having chips for lunch. A portion of chips costs between Sh30 and Sh50.

Mr Francis Mwikali, a 28-year-old painter, said the situation was grim. He said council askaris (security officers) worsened the situation by arresting women who sell food in public. “We used to buy githeri (maize and beans) at Sh10 or we could eat on credit, but not any more.”

Source – Daily Nation