Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene November - December 2016 vol.11 No.6 | Page 12

NEWS in brief 500,000 people in the U.S.A. lack adequate water and sanitation Global Highlights Some change is happening. The town of White Hall recently received funding to connect about 50 homes to sewer lines, the first in its history. Town officials are thrilled: City sewer lines are critical to attract businesses that would bring jobs. But the pace is glacial. Eli Seaborn, 73, a White Hall councilman, said progress would be slow, like the pace of civil rights gains, where legal discrimination is gone but lingers in other forms. Similar patience is required for sewage, he added. “Time is going to be the only thing that solves this problem,” he said. “It took more than 50 years for it to happen. But hopefully, it won’t take more than 50 years to fix it.” U.S. Startup Plans Africa Expansion with Solar Watering Kits Nearly half a million households in the United States lack the basic dignity of hot and cold running water, a bathtub or shower, or a working flush toilet, according to the Census Bureau. The absence has implications for public health in the very population that is the most vulnerable. Crumbling infrastructure has been a theme of this country’s reinvigorated public conversation about race — for instance, a botched fix for old pipes in Flint, Mich., that contaminated the city’s drinking water with lead. But in poor, rural places like Lowndes County, there has never been much infrastructure to begin with. “We didn’t have anything — no running water, no inside bathrooms,” said John Jackson, a former mayor of White Hall, a town of about 800 in Lowndes that is more than 90 percent black and did not have running water until the early 1980s. “Those were things we were struggling for.” There is no formal count of residents without proper plumbing in Lowndes, but Kevin White, an environmental engineering professor at the University of South Alabama, said that a survey that he did in a neighboring county years ago found that about 35 percent of homes had septic systems that were failing, with raw sewage on the ground. Another 15 percent had nothing. He added: “There are some options that may be available, but it’s going to cost thousands of dollars, and most people here can’t afford it. The answer, quite frankly, is not out there yet.” Experts and advocates have tried to find one. Grants from the state and federal governments to study the problem have come and gone, as have academics wielding surveys. There was even talk of self-composting toilets. “It’s like we’re going in circles,” said Perman Hardy, a cook in Tyler who even did a urinalysis for a study of health effects. For years, her sewage backed up every time it rained. In December, she spent all the money she had saved for Christmas presents on a new septic tank. 10 Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • November - December 2016 Farmers will receive the solar-powered pump and irrigation equipment after a small deposit A U.S. startup that sells solar-powered irrigation kits to small-scale farmers in Kenya plans to expand in East Africa, where regular droughts often result in food shortages. SunCulture, which started business in New York four years ago, has sold almost 1,000 units of the equipment that costs as much as Ksh. 248,000 ($2,400) in deals that also solve key challenges for growers in Kenya: access to finance and a steady off-take market. It plans to take operations into Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia and Burundi in coming years, Marketing Director Kathryn Weichel said in an interview in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital. “The first thing we did when we started SunCulture was to spend the first seven months with farmers piloting in the field because we needed to test the product and make sure it worked for farmers in Kenya,” Weichel said. “We try to provide them not only the irrigation system, but seeds, fertilizer, agronomy services, after sales services and financing.”