ENVIRONMENT-SENEGAL: Flouting the Most Basic Rules of Hygiene

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Abdou Faye

DAKAR, Apr 2 2003 (IPS) - Unconcerned about the glaring eyes of passers-by, a young man relieves himself on a street corner in Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

This repugnant image has become an eye sour to the city’s 2.4 million inhabitants, who have to put up with the city’s inadequate sanitary facilities daily.

”Living amidst piles of garbage and stagnant water, people on the outskirts of Dakar have ended up not heeding the most basic rules of hygiene,” laments Samba Ndiaye, a health worker in Pikine, a suburb of Dakar.

Senegal, with a population of about 10 million, has stiff hygiene regulations, which mete out heavy prison sentences and cash fines to offenders. But, the regulations are rarely implemented.

The lack of sanitary facilities in Senegalese cities means that residents, in poor suburbs, dump their wastes into septic pits, along the highways, and sometimes into waterways, clogging the water flow.

In Dakar, only 24.7 percent of households are hooked up to the city’s sewer system.

More than 40 percent of the households in urban areas lack adequate sanitation, according to a recent statistics published by the National Office of Sanitation.

Because of limited financial resources, the inhabitants of the poor suburbs of Dakar continue to face difficulties connecting to a municipal sewer system, constructing their own sewer network or maintaining their latrines.

Only 15 percent of Senegal’s urban population has access to the municipal sewer system, which exists only in cities.

Last year, the government launched a five-year project in Dakar to improve the city’s sanitation system. So far, the project has received 163 billion CFA (about 271.6 million U.S. dollars) in funding from a number of donors including the World Bank.

In six month’s time, the project, known as the Long Term Water Sector Project, is expected to improve the living conditions of low-income residents of Dakar by providing access to better sanitation.

Some 400,000 people will benefit from the project when 60,160 sanitary units are built in Dakar. The project will also rehabilitate and build 70 new blocks of latrines for schools and three outlets for waste deposits in the Pikine and Guediawaye neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city. It will also pursue programmes to change people’s behaviour – through education.

Adama Diop, one of the project’s organisers, says they work closely with community leaders like Imams in Guediawaye.

”Before this project, we used to go to our neighbour’s house to relieve ourselves or wait for nightfall so we could go behind the houses near the garbage dump,” confesses Fatima Diouf, now a proud owner of a new latrine in Guediawaye.

Guediawaye has a new latrine in almost every household in this sprawling suburb.

Babacar Diop, another beneficiary of the project, says: ”With the installation of a washhouse-septic system, I’m no longer worried about emptying the septic pit, which was expensive, since I know now that all my wastewater will be going down the sewer".

The units come with manual flushes, showers and washhouse-septic system.

Dakar alone accumulates nearly 600 cubic metres of waste, although the city does not yet have a plant to treat sewage waste.