Sad Story - We sleep in sewage

 Namibians have sought education, work, and a better life in Windhoek, the country's political and industrial core, since independence. It's more difficult to make a living in rural Namibia, the driest savannah in southern Africa, where there's little to no infrastructure, investment, or industry. With so few options for labor and education, thousands of people migrate to the city each year, and the capital's population has more than tripled since independence.

The city's limits have been stretched and sanitation has deteriorated as a result of the influx of migrants. As people arrive quicker than Windhoek can supply amenities, informal colonies such as Havana have grown uncontrolled. These newcomers construct shacks in small pockets of space with no regard for regulation, organization, or architecture. 

"There is no structure, no planning; you cannot put in water pipes," said Sebastian Husselmann, Windhoek's bulk and wastewater head engineer. "How do you put a sewage network in an unplanned area?"

Overcrowding causes feces, water, and food to cross-contaminate, making conditions ideal for disease transmission. "Some of them are 19, 20, 35 years old in one house." "One toilet for 35 people is not healthy or sanitary," Councilor Rodman Katjaimo adds. This was the hardest struck by Hepatitis E, accounting for 62% of confirmed and suspected cases during Namibia's latest outbreak, which began in 2017.

In the run-up to the 2019 elections, President Hage Geingob termed the situation in informal settlements a "humanitarian crisis" and promised to clear cities of shacks by 2024. However, this has not occurred. According to Sade Gawanas, the city's previous mayor and member of the Landless People's Movement Party, they are presently growing at a rate of 10% each year in Windhoek. Erastus Uutoni, Namibia's urban and rural development minister, declined to comment on the government's inability to limit the spread of informal settlements, but he warned Namibia would face significant sanitary problems if urbanization continued unabated in February 2023. He urged local governments to prioritize sanitation facilities and the improvement of informal communities in their budgets.

Letisia Nghiondjwa, 44, moved to Havana with her husband ten years ago from Okanguati hamlet in northern Namibia "for a better life." She survives by selling fatcakes, which are fried dough coated in sugar, and oshikundu, a native Namibian beer. But she and her husband are only two of the many people who have been crammed into dangerously cramped quarters. "We live near the dumpsite, and when it rains, you can't sleep because of the smell," she explains. "It's been ten years, and the government has done nothing to make our lives simpler... We sleep in the sewer."Despite calls from ministers, MPs, and councilors across the political spectrum for increased investment in rural regions, Namibia's rural development and coordination budget fell 33% between 2019 and 2022, according to CCIJ study.

"Over the years, everyone has just been centralizing into Windhoek," said Archie Benjamin, SWAPO member and CEO of the Swakopmund municipality. "The government's intention at independence was to develop rural areas to the point where people did not feel the need to relocate, but that has not happened." If the government is to handle this expanding problem, it must act quickly. As communities like Havana spread, urbanization creates conditions that contribute to greater death and disease, and climate change exacerbates the problem by leaving people in rural Namibia who rely on crops and cattle jobless for the past seven years. Simon Dirkse, head of climate at the Meteorological Institute in Windhoek, was worried about Namibia's future and the impact of more extreme weather events. "Yes, climate change is forcing migration," he admitted, adding that "our poverty levels and these extreme events don't go together."

However, individuals must work. Selma Mpasi, 21, who sits in the shade by the side of the road selling oranges with her two-year-old daughter napping on her lap, said business is slow because fewer tourists are going by these days. "Our lands are so dry," she complains. "I really want to go to Windhoek."

Namibia is one of many African countries grappling with the most severe effects of climate change, but the problem is exacerbated by a lack of sufficient sanitation in and around towns.

Efforts to close sanitation disparities

Ndahambelela Indongo, 39, resides in Max-Mutongolume, an informal town within Havana. She used to trek for an hour into the hills to defecate, but after learning about the bad health consequences, she built her own toilet and tippy tap - a hygienic hand-washing system that uses running water.  

Indongo obtained her information from a sanitation center run by Development Workshop Namibia (DW), an NGO that has assisted communities throughout the country in becoming open defecation free (ODF) – a status granted when a community demonstrates an ongoing adoption of good hygiene practices and all of its members have access to sanitation facilities, with at least 80% of residents using them. DW accomplishes this through Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), a bottom-up collaborative method aiming at obtaining and maintaining ODF-free status by focusing on "igniting a change in sanitation behavior through community participation rather than toilet construction." Facilitators trained in CLTS assist community members in understanding the implications of open defecation, with the expectation that this will lead to mobilization, a demand for sanitation, and the community determining for themselves what action to take. DW claims to have created 66 sanitation centers in public locations since its founding, each with a demonstration toilet to encourage citizens to build their own.

To date, it claims to have taught 323 local bricklayers in toilet construction, who will subsequently be able to help homeowners. (The CCIJ was unable to independently verify those data.)

In the absence of government-backed sanitation services and education campaigns, initiatives like these have aided in the transformation of informal settlements and rural communities by establishing a demand for sanitation and pushing residents to invest in solutions. However, Namibia currently has only 13 ODF zones. Organizations like DW and UNICEF cannot bring about such widespread change, and Shuuya is realistic about what Namibia can achieve without government help. "Unless something drastic happens," he continued, "we are not going to be able to achieve the SDG6 goal." "To promote the importance of sanitation, we need a national campaign with proper government leadership." That would make a significant difference."

Reasons to be optimistic

Botswana's use of basic sanitation services has increased by 28.1% since the millennium's turn, and the country was one of only a few Sub-Saharan nations to meet the UN's Millennium Development Goals of halving the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015, doing so five years ahead of schedule. Botswana is aggressively advocating for and amending legislation to promote sanitation while also encouraging cleanliness. The Ministry of Land Management, Water and Sanitation Services established its tasks in 2017, including "coordinating and monitoring sanitation services," managing "on-site sanitation," and enhancing WASH services in collaboration with the Ministry of Health. 

Botswana has also made investments in wet and dry sanitation. Since 2001, the government has dedicated over a quarter of its budget to health care. The country now confronts its own obstacles in reaching zero open defecation by 2030, as diarrheal infections remain a major problem, and there is still a significant disparity in sanitation levels between urban and rural areas. However, Botswana's government recognizes that emphasizing sanitation and public health underlies economic growth and improved living conditions, as seen by purposeful strategy and policy. 

Namibia, on the other hand, has stalled. However, there is still a chance that the country would embrace more aggressive investment and focus on increasing sanitation through education and collaboration with communities. The 2021 Harambee Prosperity Plan II of SWAPO allotted N$120 million ($8 million) to officially establish CLTS in Namibia and "increase WASH awareness through community construction of latrines." The government has also educated personnel from four ministries in CLTS, and the most recent draft of Namibia's 2022-2027 National Sanitation and Hygiene Strategy mixes "awareness development" and "changing social norms" with infrastructure provision.

Later in 2021, the government will also launch the Namibia Water Sector Support Programme (NWSSP), one of the country's largest ever infrastructure projects targeted at directly improving sanitation for 1 million Namibians and supported in 2019 by a $121.7 million loan from the Africa Development Bank. The goal is to reduce open defecation in rural areas by 55% by 2025 and to provide adequate sanitation services to all Namibians by 2030.

When Namibia's Minister for Agriculture, Water, and Land Reform, Calle Schlettwein, started the project in August 2021, he urged service providers, contractors, and consultants not to cut corners and urged "accountability, transparency, and a corruption-free atmosphere to prevail."

This sounds fine on paper, but the scheme's biggest projects are still in the design and procurement stages after more than a year. Schlettwein's office recognized that the NWSSP had "a slow start" and that "much more funding" would be needed to fulfill SDG6. 

Lukas Shilongo, a 21-year-old Havana resident, is already dubious. "They make campaigns, lie to us, and then forget," he explained. "They offer us running water, power, and toilets. [They do not] appear."

Former Windhoek mayor Gawanas acknowledged that authorities utilized cleanliness as a campaign strategy during elections and then betrayed their pledges. "I don't think [politicians] want to solve the problem," she concluded. "They want to keep people begging for more because it is a tool for them to keep power."  

In 2019, Geingob was re-elected president for a second term. However, SWAPO's vote percentage dropped drastically from 87% in 2014 to 56% in that election, its largest loss of support in the country's history, as drought, recession, and a serious corruption scandal weighed on voters. Namibians may be tired of begging for their human rights when they return to the polls in 2024. As SWAPO's political dominance dwindles, politicians of all parties and levels may be pushed to uphold their pledges on sanitation services or face being held accountable at the polls. 

Alfons Kaundu, a Mbunza traditional authority head in rural Namibia, believes this is a viable option. "People are suffering here," he admitted. "The government does not respect the rights of the people." [However], perhaps the next election will be different."

*The budget cut for rural development and coordination in Namibia was determined using Vote 17 from the Government Accountability Reports for 2019-2020 and 2021-2022.

(This is the concluding installment of a study into Namibia's sanitation crisis.)

The Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ), a nonprofit organization that brings together investigative journalists, visual storytellers, and data scientists to tackle critical global challenges affecting marginalized communities, created this report. The Pulitzer Center provided funding for this report. 

Reference: Frederick Clayton and Sonja Smith

Photography by Margaret Courtney-Clarke