Water and Sanitation in Africa

As urbanisation continues, so too are inequalities. At the same time of seeing the new intensification of urbanisation, we are also observing the new waves of the urban political (MaFarlane and Silver, 2016) . When writing down this blog, I was reminded of my first blog talking about the 'real Africa' under the influence of Wainaina (2016) and the responsibility of writing. I came across several articles talking about the experiences of sanitation problems and inequalities they faced this week, and as a women by myself, I need to remind myself again in immersing myself in the middle of the settings proposed by the scholar, understanding the traditional customs of the country instead of interpreting scholar's words by using my own experiences and perspectives as a woman.  This week, I was surprised by how people have different interpretations and feelings to sanitation. By drawing on two examples from the poolitical protests in Cape Town and the social inequalities faced by...

The intention of this blog is to illustrate what the impacts of climate change on the hydrological cycle above the ground and their wider implications in terms of sanitation are as well as the impacts on groundwater. Climate change is deemed as having the ability to change every aspect of people's lives as well as the whole biophysical systems (Amanambu et al., 2020) . But there is a global consensus now that the global climate is changing ( Amanambu et al., 2020 ). According to the picture below, higher evaporation, higher transpiration, less snow, and higher temperature all show signs of change in face of climate change. Indeed, in most of the academic literatures on climate change, this intensification of hydrological cycle have been noted ( Creed et al., 2005 ), evidenced by higher temperatures driving higher evaporation and evapotranspiration, increase in precipitation and its variability ( Burke and Stott, 2017 ), less amount of snow ( Wang et al., 2015 ).  Fig 1: Changes in ...

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) is the reconcile between basic human needs, economic development, and ecological integrity, while respecting agreements between transboundary countries (Van der Zaag, 2005 ). Achieving this is a difficult while ambitious task, requiring efforts from different stakeholders and decisions being made inclusively. It is therefore a way of seeing problems and how to tackle them in real life ( Van der Zaag, 2005 ). This blog would firstly discuss about the related interests of  IWRM, and then I would like to draw on different examples in illustrating these. IWRM has consider a range of dimensions including the water resources themselves, the water users, the spatial scale, as well as the temporal scale ( Savenije and Van der Zaag, 2008) . Taking water resources into account is the action of taking entire hydrological cycle in to account, including everything from water quantity to river flows to water moisture; the water users are all of the pe...

Since the first lecture in Water and Development in Africa, I immersed myself in reading a variety of academic papers, noting down all the points/arguments of the scholars. This blog is sparked when I was reading Informal Urban Sanitation: Everyday Life, Poverty, and Comparison by McFarlane et al. (2014) that ethnography could be drawn on as one of the methods to do geographic research. As I can recall, this term 'ethnography' appeared in my academic life when I was doing Practice of Geography when which was my second year at UCL. I thought it would only a component of that module and I would not encounter the concept again. But I met ethnography again in the paper and was amazed by what ethnography could do in terms of analysing the wider complications of sanitation. Fig.1: The use of ethnography in water researches - women chatting when withdrawing water Looking at the methodological literature, it would be nearly impossible to find a concrete definition of 'ethnography...