OVERDUE - Tackling the sanitation taboo across urban Africa

OVERDUE interrogates infrastructural trajectories and possible pathways to tackle the sanitation taboo across African cities, a task at the core of the Open Defecation Free campaign and the 2030 SDGs, especially SDGs 6 and 11. Sanitation is critical for urban life,yet it continues to be invisibilised, avoided, systematically un-tackled or at best reduced to a 'cultural, technical or financial problem'. Disposing safely of human waste has long been recognised as a human right, yet we witness a persistent, exculpated and prevailing everyday right violation endured by the vast majority of the urban poor in Africa and worldwide.

With the grid narratives aspirating to reproduce the 19th Century sanitary revolution of the urban global North and the incremental coping mechanisms of the urban poor, most African cities just get by, skirting around the sanitation taboo. OVERDUE aims to provide fresh insights into the 'urban sanitation crisis' by decolonising the way it is framed and tackled. This involves a critical interrogation of urban sanitation trajectories and the links emerging across the sanitation continuum between large-scale infrastructural investments in grid systems vis a vis collective and individual incremental investments by the urban poor in off-grid coping mechanisms.

A sanitary revolution across urban Africa requires a new perspective on the gaps and synergies between grid and off-grid efforts and the spectrum of practices and interventions in between, which reads the sanitary metabolism of a city as a highly complex system- of pipes, energy, matter and social relations - which can produce illness or health, poverty or prosperity, suffering or well-being, stigma or respect for the different women, men, girls and boys engaged in the management of sanitation. Focusing on three fast growing cities - Freetown (Sierra Leone), Mwanza (Tanzania) and Beira (Mozambique) - OVERDUE examines the sanitation taboo across contrasting colonial legacies, with links to the experiences of Francophone urban Africa.

Our aim is to produce fresh outlooks and robust evidence for effective pathways to equitable sanitation across urban Africa's diversity, through three work packages (WPs). The first two WPs offer a reframed diagnosis of sanitation trajectories in Mwanza, Beira and Freetown, unveiling their spatial and social configurations and the historical and contemporary taboos that undermine equitable pathways. WP1 tracks down past, ongoing and projected infrastructural investments in the cities, scrutinising their political economy and approach to 'sanitation deficits' often through the expansion of sewer systems without secondary treatment. WP2 traces existing off-grid sanitation practices and investment flows by informal dwellers, assessing their outcomes and implications. WP3 expands our critical and propositive enquiry to a wider context to document, debate and evaluate emerging sanitation arrangements that could bridge grid and off-grid arrangements at scale across Francophone, Lusophone and Anglophone urban Africa. The ultimate aim is to contribute to visions for "bridging" policy measures (how do we do it) and practical solutions (what is working best), for whom and why.

We argue that sanitation 'deficits' and 'solutions' need to be de-colonised for the right to sanitation to be realised across African cities. Adopting a post-colonial perspective, we aim to provide fresh insights into how contrasting colonial legacies are imbricated in contemporary urban systems to produce different sanitation trajectories. We draw on intersectionality scholarship to shed light into how people's experiences and opportunities differ depending on gender and other social identities and their diverse, multi-layered and intersecting relations.

The research team adopts a knowledge coproduction approach and aims to actively involve potential beneficiaries and users in such process in order to tackle the sanitation taboo in-depth and at scale not only in the three case study cities but across urban Africa. A highly interdisciplinary project team with a solid track record working in urban Africa and with African partners from academia, the engineering sector and grounded civil society organisations has the capacity to translate research into actionable knowledge and impact, as well as to support the multiple translations required to expand dialogue and fruitful exchanges across different key agents of change and across multiple languages.

The project aims for the following stakeholder groups to benefit:
A. Poor women and men, boys and girls and their local collectives.
B. Small-scale independent sanitation providers (SSIPs), WASH committees and sanitation technicians.
C. Policy-makers, city officials, councillors, planners, utilities and intermediary organisations guiding the design and implementation of sanitation interventions in the three case study cities and across urban Africa.
D. International external support agencies (ESAs) and other institutions that shape politically, financially, academically or technologically the provision of sanitation infrastructure and services.
E. Early-career researchers and practitioners.

Stakeholder groups A and B will be actively involved in data collection and analysis to develop their skills and capacity to monitor, evaluate, improve and expand sanitation provision as well as facilitate communication and collaboration with others. Dialogue with target groups C and D in each case study city will be pursued through a range of participatory action research tools. Local and regional workshop as well as Focus Group Discussions will strengthen dialogue among and across stakeholder groups and promote horizontal communication and feedback loops. The project is designed to maximise its impact in developing the capacity of target group E, through their active engagement in project implementation and communicating findings. Capacity-building beyond the project team will be achieved through regional exchange visits between mixed stakeholder groups from each city as well as visits to other initiatives across urban Africa to exchange experiences and enter into a critical dialogue. Participation beyond the three case study cities from representatives across all stakeholder groups will be sought through regional workshops and strategic use of different networks to facilitate knowledge sharing and coproduction across Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa. An external Advisory Group consisting of 3 world-leading specialists from academia and practice will scrutinise the quality and relevance of research findings at different stages to maximise the policy impact of research outputs and provide access to their international networks of organisations throughout the the project. Dissemination of findings through digital and printed outputs, and participation in key events and conferences will reach a broader audience and further enhance opportunities for research uptake.