It was a Tuesday in late July 2023 — midwinter in Nyamira County, a region in Western Kenya with about half a million residents. A middle-aged man a county over had just been charged the day before with trafficking an endangered pangolin. The biggest news in the area was a series of anti-government demonstrations.
Then the girls began getting sick.
“We were told that the students were unwell,” a school system spokesperson told Kenyan outlet The Nation shortly after what would become a large outbreak. “Arrangements were made to take them to Ekerenyo and Mogumo [health clinic] in Ikonge.”
Starting one year ago today, on the evening of July 18, and continuing into the next day, girls from Ikonge PAG Girls Secondary School in Nyamira County began to show repeated cases of the same symptoms: diarrhea, vomiting, lower abdominal pains. Some were taken to Mogumo, a healthcare center near the school, according to local media outlet The Standard. At least 90 others were taken to Ekerenyo Subcounty Hospital. Ultimately, at least 148 girls were treated in an incident that was blamed on consumption of contaminated water.
It wasn’t the first time in recent years that Kenya has played host to a major case of sickness caused by water — not even the first time that year: In April 2023, another diarrhea outbreak resulted in four deaths and the hospitalization of 124 children, also at a school. Around 66 per cent of fecal waste in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, is left untreated, and it frequently seeps into drinking water supplies — a situation that also exists in some other African capital cities.
And according to researchers, Canada is partially to blame.
‘Grossly deficient’
Ginger has a long history in Kenya. The intensity of the flavor is dependent on when the root is harvested, according to an article by George Michaels Mbakahya in The Standard, with older plants producing roots with a hotter, stronger taste. Young ginger roots have a milder flavor.
Gingerol, a natural component of ginger root, benefits gastrointestinal motility — the rate at which food exits the stomach and continues along the digestive process — according to materials from Johns Hopkins University. Eating ginger encourages efficient digestion, so food doesn’t linger as long in the gut.
It’s suitable, then, that when Dr. Jethron Akala, who teaches at Maseno University, sits down to meet at a cafe table in a restaurant near the Yaya Centre shopping mall, in Nairobi’s wealthy Kilimani district, one of the first things that he talks about is ginger. Akala, who knows a thing or two about the digestive aftershocks that a dysfunctional water system can cause, says that Kenya’s de facto national tea, Dawa, — the word means “medicine” in Kiswahili — is available all over the city, including on the menus we’re looking at.
Soon talk turns to the city’s network of pipes and wells.
“How I came to study [public water] … I would say it was a big coincidence,” says Dr. Akala, who wrote his dissertation on Nairobi’s water system while earning his history doctorate in Darmstadt, Germany. “I had done my master’s research on urban governments, urbanization [and] marginalization.”
“Marginalization plays out in terms of access to basic infrastructure … that was the foundation.”
Akala is taking time out of his day to discuss the city’s constellations of supply pipes, pumping stations, boreholes, wells and sewerage infrastructure. In his academic writing, he has stated that reforms pushed by western governments in recent decades “have focused on alleviating presumed managerial and administrative weaknesses rather than attacking the main problems: an ageing pipe network and shortage of trained personnel.”
To improve the water supply system, he writes, the government would have had to first locate the source of the system’s vulnerability. For Nairobi, he says, most reforms “were blanketly applied” from the prescriptions that came from the Bretton Woods institutions — the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — “key amongst them being privatisation of major urban infrastructural services.”
The neoliberal ideology that has impacted water and sanitation “was centred more on the belief in the superiority of the markets in allocating resources and the claim that interactions with nature were best served by a market economy and a liberal international order,” Akala wrote in his 2018 dissertation, stating the the 1992 Dublin Declaration was a key pivot point in the move to push for private water operators in G77 countries.
Even with the water supply system suffering under a regime of forced privatizations, though, he says the water supply system in Nairobi has received better treatment than the sewage disposal system, which is not as profitable to operate and expand.
“According to the International Water Association (IWA), sanitation provision in Nairobi is grossly deficient,” wrote Akala, who has been vocal on the infrastructure issue in years since the publication. “The UN Habitat in 2003 reported that about 10 percent of Nairobi’s population was served by sewers while 20 percent relied on septic tanks and the remainder used latrines. The bulk of Nairobi’s population still relies on traditional pit latrines.”
Pressure from Ottawa
On a human level, the problem touches both the supply system and the sewage system, with Nairobi being among the cities with the highest risk of contaminated water reaching human lips. That’s because of not only the lack of strong sewage infrastructure, but the increasingly common use of local water sources.
“If you’re living in a desert and there’s no groundwater, you’re fine,” says Martin Van-Den-Berghe3, whose scientific work has included research on fuels and pollution. But if someone is drinking water in a city where groundwater is used, he says, there is potential danger, as leaked contaminants can be brought into people’s homes via wells, which are relatively shallow and often hand-dug, and possibly via boreholes, which tend to be deeper and more professionally drilled. In Nairobi, only 50 per cent of city residents have access to piped water, with the rest obtaining water from kiosks, vendors, illegal connections, and thousands of neighbourhood boreholes, according to Akala’s doctoral research.
When people are pushed to use non-municipal sources of water that are not clean, observers then see “a spike” in pollution and water-borne diseases, says Mutono Nyamai, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Nairobi who has researched the city’s water system. She says the number of boreholes in Nairobi has gone up from around 3,000 to more than 6,000 in the last decade, though the city’s government currently only tracks about 2,000 of the private holes, with many of the untracked water extraction sources “unfit for human consumption.”
Some of [the boreholes] are in close proximity to the sewer system, Nyamai says, “so you find that the water from the sewer seeps into the borehole water, and that makes it not fit for consumption,” leading to a rise in the rate of water-borne diseases.
Canada’s government, researchers say, is partially to blame. The privatization of previously public water supply systems—privatization heavily encouraged by Canada and other G7 powers—has created a failing municipal system that leaves city residents digging for water in potentially contaminated areas. Canada’s4 outsized role as a key member of the World Bank—with six times the World Bank voting share than its population size would suggest, according to Canadian Foreign Policy Institute fellow Yves Engler—means that it has played an influential part in pushing for privatization, which has also negatively affected countries’ economies.
“Ottawa [has] pushed African countries to liberalize their economies despite overwhelming evidence that poor countries which prosper, almost without fail, pursue auto-centered (inward-looking) economic policies,” Engler writes in his book, Canada in Africa, arguing that most currently successful large economies got to where they are by embracing government ownership of infrastructure and the use of protectionism. Now that western countries have grown under protectionist policies, however, he says that they are currently “kicking the ladder away” by insisting that countries in the Global South embrace the free market at nearly any cost—often to the benefit of established western companies that once benefited from protectionism, and to the detriment of local infrastructure and industry.
Engler states that the Canadian government earmarked millions of dollars in the early 2000s to “support [the] creation of an enabling environment for private participation in infrastructure” in the Global South—first through Canadian International Development Agency assistance that was often contingent upon privatization, and later through similar pressure from Global Affairs Canada. His book further states that the result of such policies has been a system in which water—as well as electricity, port, and railway—infrastructure have fallen victim to such pushes. At the beginning of the 1990s, for example, all 34 of Africa’s railways were state-owned, but by 2014, “half of them had been concessioned to foreign operators.” This, in turn, often led to scaled-back railway service at a time when the climate emergency was making rail travel more important than ever before.
Similarly, Nyamai says, the takeover of East African water delivery systems by western-backed private firms has in many cases led to a withering of once-encouraging promises for system expansion and reinvestment. In Nairobi, that has meant that locals dig wells or boreholes almost anywhere they can in order to get water that is no longer reliably or affordably delivered from municipal pipes, often tapping into contaminant plumes from industry or from untreated sewage outflows.
Akala says that while international privatization advocates talk a good game about pumping private money into infrastructure upgrades, they rarely deliver. He says that sewage systems have been particularly neglected under the current, privatized setup, and that this sometimes leads to leaching of sewage pollutants into borehole or well water, along with the types of problems associated with fueling stations leaks like those suspected to be present at some Canadian embassies in East Africa.
‘A gap in resources’
In Nairobi, the lack of knowledge about where contaminated water goes is especially pronounced, with one official saying in 2018 that only 100,000 cubic litres of human waste gets to the Ruai treatment plant each day, and that over 400,000 cubic litres remains unaccounted for by the county.
“The plant receives a very small percentage of waste despite the pumping of more than 500,000 litres of water daily,” the official told The Nairobi Star at the time.
“We do not know how much goes to septic tanks, conservatories and pit latrines and we do not know where it is getting lost – whether through overflowing and use of pit latrines,” she added.
Since 2018, things haven’t gotten much better, with a Star report from last year still citing the 66 per cent figure. The African Population and Health Research Center told the paper for that report — released on World Toilet Day — that over 779 million people in Africa lack basic sanitation services, including 208 million who still practice open defecation.
“[For my doctorate research], I was looking at the nexus between water distribution and consumption and water-borne diseases in Nairobi,” Nyamai says.
“What led to this is that even other than Nairobi, if you look at other cities in Africa, these are rapidly growing in population, but then you find that the infrastructure is growing at a slower rate, compared to the population that’s growing. So it’s getting to the point where there’s a gap in resources, and when that gap comes in, that’s where you start seeing that people use substandard water. And then you see an increase in water-borne diseases.”
Fighting back
Water system privatization has received strong pushback around the globe, with 235 communities taking water back into public hands between 2000 and 2015, according to a 2017 Guardian op-ed by Meera Karunananthan, a lecturer at Carleton University in Ottawa. In Senegal — one African country where Canadian interests have had a role in a privatization scheme pushed by western governments — she says it’s not the place of the World Bank to dictate policies on water system privatization.
“People I have spoken to in these villages whose water systems were taken over by [western companies] tell me they were not consulted by the Senegalese government. These are people who were directly involved in the community-run water systems, which operate as independent cooperatives in rural Senegal. They didn’t realize their government had the power to sell water systems that were collectively financed and managed by the communities themselves,” Karunananthan states in the op-ed.
Likewise, residents in large African cities in other countries are also heavily dependent on their communities’ efforts, often relying on unofficial groundwater sources — often dug as community efforts — thanks to the vacuum left by privatization mandates and underinvestment in public utilities. In Harare, Zimbabwe, there are 28,000 registered boreholes, and approximately 80 per cent of the population is dependent on groundwater for potable supply, according to the groundwater management institute. Zimbabwe has during recent decades struggled with massive and deadly cholera outbreaks — closely linked to contaminated water — and while vaccines have been helpful in preventing some deaths, the infrastructure issues that play a major role in the outbreaks remain.
Another East African country, Mozambique, has also seen recent cholera challenges, battling an outbreak of the disease after Cyclone Freddy overwhelmed water infrastructure in 2023.
There are some countries within the Global South that are rejecting water system privatization and improving their urban water systems, Karunananthan says:
“The Transnational Institute and Public Services International Research Unit have been documenting these efforts and have found 267 cases where communities have reversed the trend of privatization and brought water and sanitation services back into public hands in the last two decades.”
Still, she says, there are obstacles for countries and communities that want to take back local control, with international privatization mechanisms that “undermine the capacity of states” to adapt to climate change and other challenges. These can include Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements (FIPAs), which allow Canadian companies to sue governments internationally in investor-friendly tribunals, should those governments impose environmental regulations or other laws that might hurt corporate profits.
That means that if an African country were to pass a new regulation saying that western-backed water supply companies needed to fund borehole safety improvements or invest a certain amount of their profits back into building a system that gave clean water to everyone, they could be sued in a non-neutral venue for lowering financial rewards to shareholders.
“For a country in the Global South,” Karunananthan argues, “running the risk of being sued for tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars can create a policy chill effect.”
That can be harmful for citizens on a continent that — contrary to most western narratives about generous industrialized countries donating to keep things afloat — is giving more than it takes.
Canadian companies controlled $37.8 billion of mining assets in Africa in 2019, according to Natural Resources Canada. Africa loses roughly $203 billion for every $162 billion of aid, according to a 2017 report by 10 NGOs, thanks in no small part to extractive industries. The report directly refutes the idea that Africa is a continent reliant on external donors’ generosity, stating that it is rather Africa acting as a donor continent for the rest of the world.
Beyond Africa
According to Collins Obar6, who runs a community borehole in northwest Nairobi, not all of the news is bad. In an October 2022 interview, Obar said that the borehole licensing program in Nairobi has improved the quality of borehole water, and that most modern boreholes are deep enough to mitigate risk of groundwater being contaminated by runoff pollutants. (The borehole Obar runs is professionally constructed and 300 meters deep—roughly the height of the First Canadian Place building in Toronto.)
However, Nyamai says, “the government only knows [about] a quarter of the boreholes,” with a majority of the more than 6,000 neighborhood boreholes in Nairobi being unlicensed, meaning they do not go through the safety checks Obar’s borehole faces. Similar situations exist in other East African cities, which could mean that if there’s sewage or another contaminant spreading through groundwater, it could make it into drinking water.
And with the lack of publicly owned pipes in many large African urban areas, many resort to septic systems and trucks when not just using open pits — a setup that can easily fail, as when a sewage truck driver in Lagos was accused in February of dumping his material in locations dangerous to public health. (Lagos has in recent months received international attention for its struggles with cholera. In the same time period, parts of Kenya have also been highlighted in the press for their struggles with sanitation.)
The push to privatize public infrastructure is not just influencing African communities. In the United Kingdom — formerly Kenya’s colonial ruler — there was also water-related news on July 18, 2023, the day the girls in Nyamira County started to become sick.
On that summer Tuesday, a few hours before the first Kenyan girls began reporting symptoms, The Guardian reported that England’s Thames Water Company, a large, privatized provider of infrastructure for Great Britain, saw a decline of nearly 30 per cent in the valuation of shares held by the company’s biggest investor, Canada’s Ontario Municipal Employees’ Retirement System, putting a question mark over the future of water infrastructure in many UK communities.
The company wasn’t considered profitable enough.
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