Sanitation and Wastewater Atlas of Africa

5.2.2 The AfricaWater Vision 2025

5.2.3 AfricanMinisters’Council onWater

• Focus on the poorest, most marginalised and unserved aimed at progressively eliminating inequalities in access and use and implement national and local strategies with an emphasis on equity and sustainability • Mobilize support and resources at the highest political level for sanitation and hygiene to disproportionately prioritize sanitation and hygiene in national development plans • Establish and track sanitation and hygiene budget lines that consistently increase annually to reach a minimum of 0.5 per cent of GDP by 2020 • Ensure strong leadership and coordination at all levels to build and sustain governance for sanitation and hygiene across sectors, especially water, health, nutrition, education, gender and the environment • Develop and fund strategies to bridge the sanitation and hygiene human resource capacity gap at all levels • Ensure inclusive, safely-managed sanitation services and functional hand-washing facilities in public institutions and spaces • Progressively eliminate untreated waste, encouraging its productive use • Enable and engage the private sector in developing innovative sanitation and hygiene products and services especially for the marginalised and unserved • Establish government-led monitoring, reporting, evaluation, learning and review systems • Enable continued active engagement with AMCOW’s AfricaSan process Box 5.2. The N’gor Declaration on Sanitation and Hygiene – Commitments access and use, improving waste management and establishing budgets for sanitation and hygiene. The worst performing of the commitments is that of eliminating untreated waste and encouraging its productive reuse. Overall, the enabling environment for sanitation and hygiene services needs to be strengthened. Country targets Monitoring of country targets is generally weak, as more than half of the countries have made little progress in establishing the enabling environment to facilitate this. For instance, no country has made sufficient progress in establishing the enabling environment for eliminating untreated wastewater to report on targets.

The Africa Water Vision was developed as the continent’s response and overall policy framework to address the key challenges facing the water sector. Echoing the call in Agenda 2063, the Vision aims to stimulate a change in approach towards equitable and sustainable use and management of water resources for poverty alleviation, socioeconomic development, regional cooperation and the environment. To this end, it provides very specific policy guidance to countries to develop and implement programmes aimed at strengthening governance of water resources; improving the wise use of water; meeting urgent water needs, including expanding safe water supply and sanitation services to meet basic human needs; and strengthening the financial base for the desired water future. • Sustainable access to a safe and adequate water supply and sanitation to meet the basic needs of all • Water inputs towards food and energy security are readily available • Water for sustaining ecosystems and biodiversity is adequate in quantity and quality • Water-resources institutions are reformed to create an enabling environment for effective and integrated management of water in national and transboundary water basins, including management at the lowest appropriate level • Water basins serve as a basis for regional cooperation and development, and are treated as natural assets for all within such basins • There is an adequate number of motivated and highly skilled water professionals • There is an effective and financially sustainable system for data collection, assessment and dissemination for national and transboundary water basins • There are effective and sustainable strategies for addressing natural and human-made problems affecting water resources, including climate variability and change • Water is financed and priced to promote equity, efficiency, and sustainability • There is political will, public awareness and commitment among all for sustainable management of water resources, including the mainstreaming of gender issues and youth concerns and the use of participatory approaches Box 5.1. Policy statements in the AfricaWater Vision 2025

Formed in 2002, the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW) aims to promote cooperation, security, social and economic development and poverty eradication among Member States through effective management of the continent’s water resources and the provision of water supply services (AMCOW n.d.). As the Specialized Committee for Water and Sanitation in the African Union (AU), AMCOW provides the sectoral leadership at continental level needed to tackle the water challenge in Africa and to this end has included sanitationasoneof thestrategicpillars intheAMCOW Strategy 2018–2030. The AMCOW is also mandated to develop and follow-up on an implementation strategy for achieving the vision and commitments expressed in the N’gor Declaration on Sanitation and Hygiene (N’gor Declaration). A major initiative of AMCOW is the Africa Conference on Sanitation (AfricaSan) which has developed into a strong movement that blends political support, technical advancement and knowledge exchange to drive the momentum for improved sanitation in Africa. AfricaSan5, which was held in Cape Town, South Africa, in February 2019, focused on progress towards achieving the vision and commitments of the N’gor Declaration. The Conference noted the slow progress that has been made in achieving the N’gor Commitments and called on Heads of State of the AU “to declare an Africa-wide state of emergency on sanitation and hygiene” (AfricaSan 2019). 5.2.4 The N’gor Declaration on Sanitation and Hygiene The N’gor vision and commitments, adopted by the fourth AfricaSan Conference in 2015, aim to accelerate the achievement of water and sanitation goals in Africa. The commitments are framed around issues such as inequalities in access and use, support to the sector at the highest political level, financing and human resource needs, waste management and government-led monitoring and evaluation of national initiatives. The building blocks necessary to achieve the commitments, and which form the framework within which implementation is evaluated, are the existence of an enabling environment and sanitation and hygiene service delivery targets, which countries set for themselves. According to the 2019 AMCOW review, progress towards the commitments is slow, and countries will need to act quickly to speed up implementation if they are to meet SDG targets. Enabling environment Generally, countries have made significant efforts to establish leadership and coordination structures. However, this is not the case for the key commitments to eliminating inequality of

Source: Africa Water Vision

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SANITATION AND WASTEWATER ATLAS OF AFRICA