Rwanda loses RWF32 billion annually due to poor sanitation. This revelation is contained in a study conducted by the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) on the ‘Economic Impact of Poor sanitation in Africa’.
It’s approximated that 7,200 Rwandans including 6,100 children under 5, die each year from diarrhoea nearly 90% of which is directly attributed to poor water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH).
The Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project aims at increasing availability of water supply, and sanitation services in rural areas in Rwanda.
Poor sanitation costs Rwanda 32 billion Rwandan Francs each year, equivalent to US$54 million, according to a desk study carried out by the Water and Sanitation Program. This sum is the equivalent of US$5 per person in Rwanda per year or 0.9% of the national GDP.
The study shows that only 4.6 million Rwandese use unsanitary or shared latrines and 0.3 million have no latrine at all and defecate in the open. Also the poorest quintile is 3 times more likely to practice open defection than the richest.
Open defecation costs Rwanda US$3.9 million per year – yet eliminating the practice would require less than 70,000 latrines to be built and used. US$0.8 million lost each year in Access Time:
It is also indicated in the study that each person practicing open defecation spends almost 2.5 days a year finding a private location to defecate leading to large economic losses.
This cost falls disproportionately on women as caregivers that may spend additional time accompanying young children the sick or elderly relatives. This cost is likely to be an underestimation as those without toilets, particularly women, will be obliged to find a private location for urination as well.
The study further reveals that US$51 million is lost each year due to Premature Death.
In addition poor sanitation is a contributing factor through its impact on malnutrition rates to other leading causes of child mortality including malaria, ALRI and measles.
The WSP study indicates that US$0.2 million is lost each year due to Productivity Losses whilst sick or accessing healthcare. This includes time absent from work or school due to diarrheal disease, seeking treatment from a health clinic or hospital, and time spent caring for children under 5years suffering from diarrhoea or other sanitation-attributable diseases.
Also US$1.9 million is spent each year on Health Care. Costs associated with health seeking behaviour include consultation, medication, transport and in some cases hospitalization that burden households and government spending.
Diarrheal diseases directly, and indirectly via malnutrition (and its consequences for other diseases such as respiratory infections and malaria) are all leading causes of morbidity.
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% of the population are 3 times more likely to practice open defecation than the wealthiest 20% of the population.
Therefore for the poorest, 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.
In efforts to resolve problems identified by Water and Sanitation Program, it is recommended to allocate higher investments to Sanitation, address bottlenecks in the service delivery pathway, Target investments to the poorest and elimination of open defecation.
