NWSC, Donors and partners meet to tackle sanitation issues
Donors, Partners and NWSC convene to deliberate about the Project; Reinforcing Capacity of African Sanitation Operators on non-sewer and FSM Systems through Peer-to-Peer Learning Partnerships-RASOP Africa Overall Progress
Different implementing actors as well as current potential partners met in a three-day workshop at IREC to assess the progress made during the second year of the project Reinforcing Capacity of African Sanitation Operators on Non-Sewer and FSM Systems through Peer-to-peer Learning Partnerships-RASOP Africa Overall Progress.
As the number of people living in cities increases, World Bank expects it to increase even more to 5 billion by 2030. Therefore growth in cities in decades ahead will be unprecedented in the developing world. This phenomenon will be particularly obvious in Africa and Asia as the urban population will double from 2000 to 2030. Therefore access to drinking water and sanitation will continue to be a daily struggle for hundreds of thousands of city’s residents in these continents.
In the light of this, many African countries with the support of donors (BMGF, AFDB/AWF, USAID etc.) have been struggling to reverse the trend by introducing, with varying degrees of success, different models of onsite sanitation systems accessible to more than 90% of the African population.
In view of improving sharing of success stories, in 2008 the African Water Association (AFWA) imitated the Water Operators partnership Program in Africa (WOP-Africa), which gave rise to sharing of best practices between the most experienced operators (mentors} and those with the lowest performance (mentees), within the water and sanitation sector. A peer to peer partnership project was initiated by AFWA which among others identified strengths, weaknesses and mainly the best opportunities. This is specifically dedicated to the sanitation sector in general and faecal sludge management in particular.
Through this project, AFWA also intends to foster the establishment of strategies for on-site sanitation and faecal sludge management in five African cities namely Bamako(Mali), Yamoussoukro(Cote d’Ivoire), Yaounde(Cameroon), Kampala and Lusaka(Zambia).