Blunders, Bloopers and Foul Ups: The Failures of Post-Colonial WASH

As I stated in my introductory post, I will be using a de-colonial approach throughout this blog series – such an approach forces us to interrogate hegemonic doctrines, discourses and legacies. I recently came across a blog post by Euphresia Luseka, which discusses the persistence ‘knowledge colonialism’ within the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector, and serves as the inspiration for today’s post, in which I'll expand on the statements made.

Recognising the Failures of Post-Colonial WASH. 

Figure 1. Posters from the 'failures event', Blunders, Bloopers and Foul Ups: A WASH Game Show (Barrington et al, 2018)

Euphresia highlights that colonial power relations continue to inform much of the rationale about what is, or isn’t worth researching. But what are the practical implications of this? Development studies, and the WASH sector, remain colonised fields; often legitimising ‘one size fits all’ strategies. This has resulted in the widespread failed sustainability of WASH projects, for example, Unicef estimates up to 50% of WASH programmes fail after 2-5 years. A ‘failures event’ – which provided the title of this post - hosted by Engineering for Change in 2018 highlights some unintended consequences of WASH projects. These examples demonstrate that the sustainability of WASH interventions is undermined by a lack of understanding of cultural sanitation behaviours and practices, otherwise known as 'software' dimensions (Jewitt, 2011).

But, why do simplifications and misrepresentations continue to imbue development studies and the WASH sector?

The Colonial Hangover.

Figure 2.  Citation map of the world where the area of each country is scaled and deformed according to the number of citations received by authors, in  public health teaching resources. This is also represented by the colour of each country (Pan et al., 2012).

Many critics point towards the ‘colonial hangover’ - the disproportionate power maintained by those not from, or based in the ‘Global South’, to control knowledge production and transfer (Collyer et al., 2019). As depicted in figure 2, there is a lack of representation of African voices in public health research: exemplified in practice by current discourses on COVID-19 within the WASH sector - nobody has ever experienced COVID-19 before, so why is it assumed that someone on lock-down in Europe, is able to advise countries in SSA on WASH sector management of the the pandemic, better than local scientists and academics? 

In her post, Euphresia highlights the supply-side incentives, and knowledge prioritisation which maintain ‘knowledge colonialism’.  I think it’s important to recognise some other ways the hegemony of Western knowledge occurs, and is re-entrenched: 

Firstly, through  ‘extroverted scientific activity’ (Hountondji, 1990), wherein researchers on the African continent investigate, first and foremost, the theoretical needs and questions of the Western academy, which often don't serve the societies in which the research is conducted. 

This paradigm is compounded by the pressure to meet the ‘international’ research standards which are almost exclusively set by increasingly private, institutions based in the Global North in order to gain exposure in academic journals, and conferences with high Impact Factors (Vega, 2018). This has resulted in what Leslie Chan describes as the obligation of ‘research from the South […] to mimic that from the North, even if it means abandoning research that would contribute to local well-being, while favouring research with international appeal’.

Similarly, as critiqued by Edwin Adjei and Rachel Strohm, centres of knowledge about Africa continue to be invested in, and hosted, outside of Africa. This is exemplified by the Centre for Public Authority and International Development (CPAID), established at the London School of Economics, and funded by a £5 million grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. Now imagine if that funding was used to support African scholarly infrastructures actually based on the continent, and focused on African audiences. Imagine how many valuable voices and contributions to knowledge we would gain!

This non-exhaustive discussion clearly demonstrates that the issue is not that knowledge production isn’t occurring in Africa, but rather, that the academic autonomy, and voices of African academics are being systematically suppressed by the ‘internationalisation’ agenda, and underinvested in. Considering this, it comes as no surprise that WASH sector projects in SSA continue to fail! 

To conclude, we can take away a key lesson from this post:

Shit happens, but it doesn’t always have to! Simply being ‘tolerant’, or giving a ‘voice’ to alternative forms of knowledge is not enough (van der Velden, 2006). To avoid future failures, WASH professionals must be ‘fiercely transparent’, accountable, and adopt a 'cognitive justice' approach to confront dominant knowledge systems with indigenous and local knowledge, and create more comprehensive dialogues on WASH development, particularly surrounding 'software' dimensions (ibid). This would provide an opportunity for everyone within the WASH ‘ecosystem’ to learn, improve outcomes, and develop. 

This post has demonstrated that contemporary WASH failures are largely rooted in a knowledge production system which systematically re-entrenches colonial power relations, and prioritises scientific/technical fixes. In my next post I will continue to explore colonial legacies with a focus on physical (sanitation) infrastructures in urban areas of SSA!