ENVIRONMENT-BENIN: Floods Pose a Major Health Risk

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Apollinaire Kouton

COTONOU, May 9 2003 (IPS) - Health officials in Benin fear that residents of Cotonou, the country’s economic capital, may face a resurgence of water-borne diseases with the mid-April’s start of the rainy season.

During the rainy season, wells, which the majority of households in this city of nearly 670,000 depend on, present a major health risk.

“All of Cotonou’s wells are polluted,” says a recent study by the ministry of the environment, in conjunction with the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ). ”The wells contain bacteria which causes diarrhoea and viral diseases.”

The water table in Cotonou is filled with waste products and faecal matter. And one third of the city’s population has no toilets and still answers the call of nature outdoors.

Another study of the city, conducted in 1999 by the Department of Health and Basic Sanitation (DHAB) in conjunction with the World Health Organisation (WHO), revealed that 14 percent of those living in poor neighbourhoods depend on well water for all domestic purposes.

In 1998, the National Institute of Statistics estimated that in Cotonou some 200,000 people are not connected to the state-owned Beninoir Electricity and Water Company (SBEE).

Only five percent of Cotonou’s population consume potable water, according to the DHAB. And almost all the houses in Benin’s big cities have wells.

”Those who drink water from the well are mostly the poor and the illiterate,” says Moussoulimi Gounou of the SBEE. ”This is mainly a poverty and development problem”.

According to official statistics, one Beninoir in three lives on less than a dollar a day.

Gounou, who is the head of the SBEE research and monitoring division, says the SBEE provides around 56 percent of water demand in eight cities in Benin.

”In our cities, everyone has access to potable water. If they are not personally connected (to the SBEE), they can always go to a neighbour, who will provide water for a fee,” he says.

Neighbours sell water in small quantities of 20 to 60 litres.

But an anthropologist, who participated in several water projects in Benin, says only 30 to 32 percent of the population of the cities have access to potable water.

In 2000, SBEE statistics showed that they had 87,050 subscribers, as compared to 80,608 in 1999, an annual increase of eight percent. Cotonou has the largest proportion, with about 50 percent subscribers, or an average of 15 users per tap. Bernard Dossou Dossa, the president of a consumer watchdog, known as ”What to Choose Benin”, says potable water continues to be a luxury for a large minority of people in Benin.

”There are those who have applied for a connection to the SBEE without any results, and there are those who are too poor to have a connection,” he says.

Access to potable water, Dossa underlines, should be a priority for the government, because ”rising health costs can be attributed to drinking dirty water”.