Background

Sanitation and Hygiene Context in Africa

Clean water, safe sanitation, and good hygiene practices are prerequisites for health and contribute to productive communities. The Covid-19 pandemic laid bare the value of these basic necessities of life as handwashing with soap and water was acknowledged as the single, cost-effective practice of eliminating pathogens including the covid-19 virus. Despite these benefits, in Africa, 418 million people still lack a basic level of drinking water, 779 million lack basic sanitation services of which 208 million still practice open defecation. About 858 million Africans do not have access to safely managed sanitation and good hygiene services.  

About the AfricaSan Initiative

The Africa Sanitation (AfricaSan) Conference was initiated to provide a platform for technical and political dialogue with governments and stakeholders to identify and share knowledge to address the sanitation and hygiene challenges in Africa. Organised biennially, the conference promotes high-level political prioritization of sanitation and hygiene issues across the continent. Since its creation, the AfricaSan movement has inspired other regions across the developing world to initiate similar sanitation conferences. Some of which include East Asia Sanitation Conference (EASAN); South Asia Conference on Sanitation (SACOSAN), and Latin America Sanitation Conference (LATINOSAN).

Central to the AfricaSan movement is the multi-stakeholder AfricaSan International Taskforce (AITF) coordinated by the AMCOW Secretariat. AITF serve as the think tank for sanitation improvement and provide technical support for sanitation processes, AfricaSan Ngor monitoring and AfricaSan Conference planning and execution.  Through the AMCOW Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), Member states provide leadership to the AITF and ensures its priorities are aligned with the needs of the Member States. 

The first conference took place in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002. Since then, the conference has become a continental sanitation movement implemented in a cyclical process of commitment setting, action-planning, implementation and monitoring. It is worthy to note that since inception, the AfricaSan movement has led to two distinct high-level declarations namely the eThekwini declaration on Sanitation and Hygiene in 2008, and the Ngor Declaration on Sanitation and Hygiene in 2015.

The eThekwini Declaration

The eThekwini Declaration  is the outcome document of the ministerial dialogue held five years after the AfricaSan was established. The commitment set out a framework of action toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals on Sanitation. Moreso, the eThekwini commitments were endorsed by the African Union Summit of Heads of State in 2008 in Sharm el Sheikh and were embedded into the Sharm El Sheikh declaration.  This high-level endorsement generated huge political interest that led to a continent-wide reawakening of the centrality of sanitation in the development agenda.

The Ngor Declaration

The Ngor Declaration on Sanitation and Hygiene succeeded the eThekwini declaration in 2015. It was established by African Ministers at the AfricaSan4 conference in Dakar, Senegal. The Declaration outlines 10 specific commitments toward an overarching pursuit to “achieve universal access to adequate, equitable, inclusive, and sustainable sanitation and hygiene services and eliminate open defecation by 2030”. The Sustainable Development Goals further reinforces the Ngor commitments with the ambitious goal to achieve global access to safely managed sanitation and hygiene paying special attention to the needs of women and girls (SGD 6.2). Both the Ngor commitments and the SDGs are closely aligned in that they both focus on establishing the enabling environment necessary to attain universal access. The Ngor commitments were adopted by the Member States and monitored regularly by AMCOW to track country progress against national targets. In 2019, the Ngor monitoring progress report was developed and presented at the AfricaSan5 conference as the baseline information on the progress of the countries against the 10 commitments.

About two Ngor reports have been developed following the baseline report. Recent Ngor monitoring report indicated that commitments 7 – treating waste, commitment 8 – private sector engagement, and commitment 5 – developing human resources are the worst performing commitments. However, all hope is not dashed as countries performed strongly on enabling environment including commitments 4 – ensuring leadership, 9 – establishing monitoring, and 2 – mobilizing support and resources. Despite these progress, stronger collaboration, financing, capacity development and

partnerships is required to deliver sanitation and hygiene services to 1.3 billion people who still live without access to these basic services.

So far, six episodes of the AfricaSan Conferences have been organized across different countries in Africa. The venue of the conferences rotates across various African countries where the AMCOW Presidency resides. In 2021, the AfricaSan Conference and the Africa Water Week were organized jointly for the first time due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the AfricaSan7 will revert to the standalone conference format to give adequate attention to sanitation.  The AfricaSan7 Conference will maintain all the components of the previous conferences and the knowledge products generated housed on the AMCOW’s knowledge hub.