Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene November - December 2016 vol.11 No.6 | Page 35

Sanitation

PROVIDING TOILETS AND OTHER SANITATION
SERVICES CREATES JOBS
The global demand for water and sanitation services
is worth over $50 billion (Freedonia 2013), so there is a
massive demand waiting to be met. Treating sanitation
provision as a long-term business opportunity, as well
as a fulfilment of people’s rights, could help speed up
progress and attract investment.
In the 2014 UN-Water Global Analysis and Assessment
of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS), less than
20% of participating countries have sufficient capacity
to meet rural sanitation needs and even fewer of
these countries have plans in place to redress this
gap (UN-Water, 2014), which requires investments
in education, curriculum development, and enabling
environments.
Making it easy for people to set up sanitation
businesses, as part of a bigger plan, will help
entrepreneurs to flourish and could accelerate
progress. Particularly in the towns and cities of lowincome countries, populations are growing fast and
their need for toilets and waste removal is already
desperate. Small-scale service providers could play
a vital role in getting toilets to people quickly and
beginning the transformation of slum areas (WaterAid
2016).
• In the EU, there are more than 2.5 million jobs in the
wastewater and solid waste management sectors
(Ernst and Young 2006).
•

The International Water Association (2014)
assessed the capacity gap for trained water and
sanitation professionals to achieve universal water
and sanitation access across 15 countries to be over
750,000 individuals.

4

REMOVING THE STIGMA FROM SANITATION
WORK
In 2013, new Indian legislation outlawed the
building of any more insanitary toilets and
employing people as ‘manual scavengers’
to clean out human faeces with their bare
hands from rudimentary latrines. The
practice will take time to eradicate, but as
sanitation improves in India, the government
is rehabilitating manual scavengers,
training them for alternative livelihoods and
providing education for their children (UN
India 2014). Placing more value and respect
for these tasks would also raise the workers’
social status.

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