Watertower News and information on water, energy and climate.
What’s the percentage of Kenyans accessing clean water in rural and urban areas?
Only 28 per cent of rural and 32 per cent of urban Kenyans have access to improved sanitation, according to WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme 2017 report.
What are sanitation statistics in terms of access to toilets; the status of open defecation?
Six million Kenyans have no access to any form of sanitation facilities and practise total open defecation. Poor domestic and personal hygiene practices help the transmission of disease-causing germs.
• directly by the faecal-oral route or by person to person or pet to person contact
• indirectly by vectors coming into contact with people or their food, people breathing in airborne droplets of moisture which contain germs or eating contaminated food.
What is the cost of poor sanitation?
The costs of poor sanitation are inequitably distributed with the highest economic burden falling disproportionately on the poorest. The average cost associated with poor sanitation, constitutes a much greater proportion of a poor person’s income than that of a wealthier person.
Access to sanitation alone demonstrates inequities. The poorest, 20 per cent, of the population are 270 times more likely to practise open defecation than the wealthiest, 20 per cent of the population. For the poorest, therefore, poverty is a double edged sword– not only are they more likely to have poor sanitation but they have to pay proportionately more for the negative effects it has.
As at 2014, poor sanitation was making Kenya lose between Sh27 billion and Sh29 billion.
Source – Ministry of Health
