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.
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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.”