Sanitation and Water Facilities Vary in Sub-Saharan Africa

In individual countries like sub-Saharan Africa, access to clean drinking water and sanitation facilities is highly variable, a new study found. Dr Rachel Pullan and colleagues, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, identified marked geographic inequalities, estimating that coverage of improved drinking water supply varied from as low as 3.2% in some districts of Somalia to as high as 99.0% in urban populations in Namibia, while access to improved sanitation ranged from 0.2% in parts of Chad to close to 100% in Gambia.

To reach these estimates, the researchers extracted data on reported household use of an improved drinking water supply (for example, a piped water supply), improved sanitation facilities (for example, a pit latrine with washable slab), and open defecation from 138 national household surveys undertaken between 1991 and 2012 in 41 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Using statistical models they estimate that rural households in the districts with the lowest levels of access within a country were 1.5-8 times less likely to use improved drinking water, 2-18 times less likely to use improved sanitation, and 2-80 times more likely to defecate in the open, than rural households in districts with the best coverage.