Expanding safe water and waste management service access to off-grid urban populations in Africa

According to WHO/UNICEF, whilst 91.8% of urban households in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) had access to piped or protected groundwater sources in 2015, only 46.2% had safely managed water available when needed. Vendors provide a key role in supplying urban off-grid populations, with consumption of bottled or bagged water (sachets, water sold in 500ml plastic bags) growing in SSA. Whilst several studies show bottles and bags are usually free from faecal contamination, given that many off-grid urban populations lack solid waste disposal services, when people drink such water, there can be problems disposing of the plastic bags and bottles afterwards.
This project aims to deliver evidence on the different ways that people sell water to off-grid populations and what this means for plastic waste management. We plan to do this in Ghana, where most urban household now drink bagged water, and by way of contrast, Kenya, where the government has banned plastic bags. In this way, we want to widen access to safe water and waste management services among urban off-grid populations, by supporting water-sellers and waste collectors to fill the gaps in municipal services.
Both countries (and many others elsewhere) already have nationwide household surveys that collect data on the food and goods people consume and the services they have. However, as yet, these surveys have not been connected to the problem of waste management. We plan to visit marketplaces, buying foods and then recording packaging and organic waste. By combining this information with the household survey data, we can work out how much domestic waste like plastics gets collected and how much is discarded or burned, ultimately entering the atmosphere or oceans.
In Ghana, we will also survey informal waste collectors in urban Greater Accra. We want to find out how much these small businesses support waste collection and recycling across this urban region (particularly plastic from bagged water), so we can help government identify gaps in waste collection coverage. We also believe highlighting the important role of small waste collectors could lead to greater business support for such collectors. We will also evaluate whether community education campaigns to encourage domestic waste recycling reduce the amount of waste and plastic observed in the local environment. Such campaigns are currently pursued by several local charities with support from the Plastic Waste Management Project.
In Kenya, where water is usually sold in jerrycans rather than bagged, the jerrycan water often gets contaminated. We plan to find out whether this jerrycan water is safer under an arrangement known as delegated management. This involves a water utility passing on management of the piped network to a local business in slum areas, so as to reduce vandalism of pipes and bring water closer to slum-dwellers. We will compare water quality in areas with and without this arrangement to see if it makes the water sold safer. We also plan to bring water-sellers and consumers together to find and test ways of reducing contamination of water between a jerry-can being filled and water being drunk at home. Rather than imposing a solution, we want to work together with vendors and consumers on this issue, but there are for example containers designed to keep water cleaner that we could explore.
Through these activities, we thus plan to develop evidence on different strategies for water-sellers to deliver safer water to people lacking piped connections, whilst managing plastic waste at the same time. In Ghana, this involves trying to increase recycling and waste collection for bagged water, which is relatively safe. In Kenya, this involves trying to reduce contamination of water sold in reusable jerrycans. Alongside our household survey evidence on how domestic waste is managed in slums, this should help governments plan waste and water services in poorer areas of Africa's expanding cities.

The project's ultimate beneficiaries are urban and peri-urban communities who lack one or more essential services in Greater Accra and Kisumu County. These constitute at least 600,000 to 800,000 people in Accra city alone, whilst around 60% of greater Kisumu's population of 500,000 live in slums. Indirectly, other such populations across Africa, an estimated 53 million people, could also benefit from the project. These populations stand to benefit from reduced exposure to unsafe water and thereby reduced mortality and morbidity from diarrhoea, e.g. cholera, reduced exposure to flooding from blocked storm drains, pests, and other hazards from unmanaged urban waste. The entry of unmanaged waste into rivers and then oceans potentially impacts populations globally through its ecological impacts and the unknown consequences of human micro-plastic consumption, particularly given long-distance transport of micro-plastics. The project addresses this by generating evidence on waste collection businesses and effectiveness of community-based waste management education.

Immediate beneficiaries are informal service providers to these populations. This includes waste collectors, who could benefit from greater business support, if their contribution to waste collection was quantified via WP2. Sachet water companies and water vendors or kiosk businesses could also benefit from greater business opportunities through increased policy support for delegated management of water services in slums. This could happen, were there evidence that Kenya's delegated management model increased water safety via WP3, or were there evidence that community education could promote recycling and offset environmental impacts of sachet consumption.

Immediate beneficiaries also include local government, e.g. the Accra and other Metropolitan Assemblies and Ministry of Health in Ghana, responsible for waste management. They could benefit through evidence on which food products result in large unmanaged waste volumes or identification of areas unserved by informal waste collectors, which could then inform policy on service delivery, other waste that could be collected alongside sachet sleeves, or sales taxes on food products. Evidence on delegated management and its impact on water safety could inform the Lake Victoria Water Services Boards and Kisumu County government's service delivery policies. National statistical agencies within and beyond the study countries stand to benefit from the development of a new domestic waste profiling module for inclusion in household budget surveys (WP1), which could then increase the relevance of the data they generate for waste management policy. NGOs working in affected communities, e.g. the CONIWAS NGO group in Ghana, could benefit from evidence on waste management and water safety intervention effectiveness, whilst the WHO/UNICEF team responsible for international monitoring of water access could benefit from the enhanced household survey methodology. This could enable generation of a new indicator for monitoring unmanaged plastic waste from packaged water consumption. We plan to invite all these organisations to the workshops described below.

Postgraduate students at participating African universities should benefit from engaging with this international project through their dissertations, increasing their career prospects. This in turn could lead to additional benefits, as these trained individuals take up posts in the environmental health sector.

Alongside a project web site, drawing on our existing networks, we will engage with beneficiaries through stakeholder workshops at the project's start and end, via two government staff members working directly on the project team, and via our project steering committee. We plan to write short policy briefs to make our findings readily accessible to those in government. We will monitor the impact of all these activities.