"Taps On, Lights Off"

Hey everyone,

I know it’s been a while since I last wrote. These past ten days or so have been busy. I am going to do my best to recap everything.

I guess I should start with last week. Last week, I met with the country director of Global Communities, Alberto Wilde. Global Communities is an international organization working on water and sanitation projects for peri-urban and urban poor communities in the Greater Accra region. Alberto was very friendly and extended me a warm welcome. We sat down and talked about some of Global Communities’ work and their projects, as well as some of their funding portfolios. He invited me to see a site visit this Saturday (tomorrow). Since Global Communities is funded largely by USAID, some workers from the USAID office in Washington are flying to Accra to see some of the projects. Although my research is based in Kumasi, which is in the Ashanti region, I am excited to go and see some of the communities where Alberto and his team are working and to learn from their experiences.

Alberto then introduced me to Joseph, the manager of the WASHUP (Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor) project, and Francis, one of the field agents for the organization. Joseph has worked for both the Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA), which is the sector in charge of rural water supply and sanitation in Ghana, as well as the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL), which is responsible for urban water and sanitation supply in the country. He had a lot of interesting insight for my project. Namely, how am I defining the ‘peri-urban communities’ that are the focus of my study? This was a fantastic point. In the background reading and research I have done on national water policy, urban water policy, and rural water policy in the country, as well as the discussions I have had with sector professionals thus far, I have come to find that in Ghana, there is no standardized definition of peri-urban. Really, this population is just now being mentioned in policy documents; it received brief mention in the national water policy, which was formed in 2007, and has been mentioned in the most recent policy on community participation and behavior change in the urban water sector, formed just last year in 2012. Honestly, it seems that urban-poor and peri-urban are used interchangeably in national documents. Yet, depending on who you ask, these populations are not the same. For instance, to Global Communities, peri-urban communities are those that are forming at the fringe of cities; they exhibit characteristics of both rural and urban settings and are not receiving services, as they are not recognized by the government as legal settlements; the urban poor are those living in shanty towns alongside developments in the city. Water and sanitation provisions in these areas are marginal, but their establishment as a population is recognized by the government. The urban poor also consist of migrants who are living in these areas in informal settlements. Yet, when I spoke with WASHTech, an organization implementing technical solutions, such as drilling boreholes and building rope wells, peri-urban settlements are made up of migrant communities. So, as you can see, there seems to be a lot of overlap between these two populations and I am still in the process of defining peri-urban for purposes of my research. In one sense, I am eager that there is no standardized national definition that differentiates these two populations because that gives me the freedom as an objective researcher to observe citizens of both areas and then decide which population I would like to focus my efforts on. On the other hand, the lack of a definition is a challenge in more ways than one. How can a policy be formed with intentions of serving a portion of the population that is disadvantaged from water services from national agencies, such as the GWCL and CWSA, if there is no national definition of who is to benefit from such policies? As a researcher, it is a challenge because while I do have the flexibility of establishing my own definition based on my observations, impressions, and background reading, I will also have to contend with the best way to conduct research that is relevant to informing national policy makers. My goal for my research is to collect data and produce a paper that I can present to sector professionals and policy makers that will spark a dialogue on these issues. I’m looking forward to seeing how much I can do in the next nine months to accomplish that goal. I feel I am off to a good start.

The following day, I went to a water conference hosted by the Resource Center Network (which I referenced in my last blog post). There were two presentations: one was an evaluation and impact assessment carried out by WaterAid on the Governance and Transparency Fund, a 5-year project funded by the EU to build capacity of local government and citizens to deal with challenges of water access. The other presentation was done by a consultant of UNICEF on gender in the WASH sector. Both presentations were well done. It was a long day; the conference started an hour late, which is technically on time for Ghana time (not being cynical in the slightest, I am just stating the obvious). But, I met a lot of really great people and will probably go to the next one if I am able to do so.

The rest of the week was filled with some mishaps. The hard drive on my computer crapped out on me. Technology and I just haven’t had a great working relationship so far this trip. It always seems to happen at the worst time, not that there ever is a good time for it to happen. The hard drive on my first Macbook crashed right in the middle of finals week my junior year, right in the middle of me writing a paper, which was a final, for my class. That was rough because at that time I didn’t think to utilize an external hard-drive. Luckily, I was able to recover some, though not all, of my documents thanks to an RA that I was working with at the time. Still thankful to Tim two years later. This time, my hard drive crashed the day after I found out I was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship, which requires a lot of prep. On the upside, I had backed everything up to an external hard drive and there are internet cafés here so it’s not as though I’m completely sans computer. Also on the upside, there is an Apple store at the mall in Accra, so it was good that it happened while I am here and not in Kumasi. I took it to the Apple store and the technician working there told me that the connecting cable in my hard drive disconnected and that if I brought in my external hard drive on Sunday (two days later), then he could fix it. So, on Sunday, I took a trip to the mall. What Evans (the technician) ultimately did was removed the hard drive from my computer, put it in an external carrying case, and made my computer temporarily useable. Whenever I need to use my computer, I plug in the external hard drive and it will work. As first this wasn’t a problem; my computer was working well. Lately, I have to restart it every hour or so while I am using it because it freezes. I just need it to make it for one more week, then I can get it repaired and buy a tablet to be on the safe side. Oh technology.

As I am sure most of you are aware, not everyone in Ghana has piped water in their homes. Many people fetch water every day from a standpipe, well, or borehole and store it in multiple containers in their homes. Where I am living, we don’t have piped water, but have access to a well at our neighbor’s home and a standpipe in our backyard that turns on sporadically. When I say sporadically, I mean that it does not turn on every day and then when it does come on, it could be at 3:00 in the afternoon, or 2:00 in the morning. I told my sister, Ama, who fetches the water, to wake me the next time the tap comes on so that I can help her collect water for the house. So, Friday night the tap came on around 11:00PM and Ama woke me up to help her. The electricity was off, so the process was more complicated than it would have been otherwise. We had two small wind-up lanterns to guide our path from the tap to the water’s final destination. We literally filled every bucket in the house- the bathroom water containers, the kitchen buckets, and even the largest cooking pots we had. I went through the monotonous, exhausting process of filling, pouring, then journeying back to the tap to refill my bucket, repeating the process. My bucket was only half full, yet my body swayed under the weight of the water, as I used muscles I never knew existed. As we hoarded the water, unsure of when the tap would come on again, I gained a lot of respect, even more than I already had, for Ama, Magdalene, my host family and women of Africa in general. They do this everyday- tired or not, sick or not. There is no other choice. What’s more, and what really made me feel a sense of injustice, is that I learned from Magdalene that this water cannot even be consumed without first being boiled. I should have thought of this considering everyone in the house, myself included, drinks from sachets of water that are bought in bulk and then sold on the roadside. Can you imagine having to fetch water every day that is not even able to be consumed? Imagine not having piped water in your home, going to a well every day to fetch water, then not even being able to drink it without first putting it through some method of purification. It’s hard to envision, yet that is exactly the reality of so many people here; I want to make clear that this is not the case for everyone, but many do live under such conditions.

I also learned that water is billed on a fixed monthly price; rather than paying for the amount that you use, water users, such as my host family, pay a standard rate every month. This is a terrible idea in my opinion. To begin, it is unjust for consumers who do not benefit from a consistent supply, such as my host family, to have to pay for more water than they use, let alone even receive. The tap could turn on every day or just two days out of the month, and still, my host mother would have to pay the same amount. Secondly, and taking rate of flow out of the picture, does a standardized cost for water encourage efficient use? Does and can a fixed monthly cost encourage conservative consumer behavior? Is a set tariff the most effective way to manage scarce resources? These are important questions, to which I have no real answers and can, at this point, only speculate. Hopefully, I can begin to form some salient hypotheses on these topics over the next 8 months I am here.

Collecting water with Ama caused me think differently, too, about water security at the household level in the urban sphere in Accra. It is so easy to look around Accra, a bustling, rapidly developing metropolis, and forget that there are problems providing the most basic of provisions here. From a geographer’s perspective, Ghana is a prime example of uneven development. I wish I could capture how it feels to drive through Accra and turn off a main road right into a community without access to running water or that is prone to floods for lack of drainage ditches. Granted, each country has these problems to certain extents. For those of you from Maryland, I’m sure Baltimore comes to mind. No matter how long I am here or how many cities I see, I am sure that these stark disparities will never fail to make me question how we can improve current systems that lead to such inequalities. 

Until the next post,

Chelsea