Kidnapping, Raping, Identity Loss: How the Struggle for Water Puts Disabled Africans in Harm’s Way

By Njukang Princeley, Cameroon.

When Estela Seka Naiben defied her visual impairment in 2013 to provide clean drinking water to disabled students in Bamenda, Northwest Cameroon, she was seeking solutions to one of the problems plaguing Africans with disabilities, a searing water crisis.

Although water occupies 70% of the earth surface and plays a central role in the life of every individual, clean drinking water is hard to find. According to The World Economic Forum, over 2.2 billion people still lack access to safely managed drinking water, globally. And the most disproportionately affected of these people are persons with disabilities, especially those in Africa, where things are often setup to exacerbate their exclusion. “I was facing many challenges as far as accessing clean water is concerned,” Estela recalled. “Blind people like me and my friends had to pay people to fetch water for us, which was really expensive,” she added, explaining that trekking to get water was really not an option, since roads to the water points were largely inaccessible.

Speaking to DNA following the celebration of this year’s World Water Day on March 22, Estela revealed that she had been looking for ways to cope with the water crisis for so many years, before stumbling on Farmer Tantoh, a prominent water conservationist who builds community water projects for vulnerable communities. “When I listened to him on Morning Safari, (a radio program on CRTV Northwest, which is one of the regional stations of the Cameroon Radio Television,) I immediately called him to discuss how we could supply water to my Kumbo community, and to my disabled friends who were studying in Bamenda,” she narrated with nostalgia.

Reflecting on this year’s theme for World Water Day; “Water for peace,” Estela regretted that conflict in the region had led to the suspension of the project, shooting persons with disabilities into inexorable suffering. “Even the taps in my village are all broken, but they can’t be repaired because of the risks,” she lamented.

How Africans with Disabilities Sweat to Get Water/

Desmond Kum Nji, a visually impaired Philosophy teacher, who is also a Doctoral Candidate of Law and Logic at the University of Bamenda in Cameroon’s Northwest Region, is one of those who has battled ax and teeth, just to get the life giving substance. “Persons with disabilities in Cameroon and across Africa are really suffering, as far as getting access to water is concerned,” he says. “The situation is even worsened in Cameroon’s Northwest and Southwest Regions, due to the sociopolitical unrest.” He further revealed to DNA that several persons with disabilities have been kidnapped or raped in recent years, as they go in search of the invaluable liquid.

Even after becoming blind at the age of two, Desmond says he did not fully experience the water crisis as other disabled peers in Africa, until 2014, when he turned 16. That year, he entered high school and started living alone. “The realization dawned on me like an earthquake,” he said. “I would come back from school and go as far as Parcours Vita, (a nearly 2 Kilometer distance), to fetch water.

To Desmond, the problem wasn’t just the distance, although it certainly reduced the time he needed to put into his studies. The problem was, he says, the many risks involved. From almost being knocked down by a bike to narrowly escaping gunshots, his life has been threatened, in quest for the precious liquid. “There was even a time I went to carry water, and fell into a pit,” he recalled, wondering what would have happened to his life if passersby had not intervened. “The injuries were too many.”

While sighted individuals can see the water they are carrying, those with visual impairments cannot. This often exposes them to dirty water, which can lead to dire health consequences. “I’ve contracted typhoid many times as a result of drinking dirty water,” Desmond intimated.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO,) contaminated drinking water can transmit diseases such as Diarrhea, Cholera, Dysentery, Typhoid and Polio, and is estimated to cause approximately 505000 diarrheal deaths each year. The implications, for Africans with disabilities, are fatal, since access to safely managed drinking water, both at home and in public places, is hard. “The inability of the government to provide us with pipe-borne water makes it difficult for us to get clean water to drink,” Iddrisu Abdul, a hearing impaired man in northern Ghana, revealed. “We’re drinking water with animals, and when the dry season comes, we have to travel far to get water, because it is too costly to buy water in gallons.”

But the limited availability of freshwater doesn’t only affect the health of persons with disabilities, it equally stalls their independence. “I have to ask my friends whether the water I’m using is clean, especially when I’m washing my white shirts,” Desmond explained. And he’s not alone.

Lucy Mbuh, a mobility impaired lady who lives in Buea, the capital of Southwest Cameroon, revealed that the absence of accessible water in her community has rendered her completely dependent on others. “I pay up to CFA2000 ($3.29) weekly to get water. I feel I’m overstressing those who offer the service, like I cannot do without them,” she revealed. “This really eats me up, because they are not always there, and I don’t have money to pay them every week.” Lucy says she stopped going out to get water when her prosthesis broke for the third time, as she struggled to cover the distance.

Water is a basic necessity whose uses cut across, and for Mbuh Lucy, the lack of it means misery. “I’m really suffering. I cannot do laundry, I cannot cook, even take a satisfying shower because I just have to manage,” she said. Having moved into her current residential area five months ago after learning that water was more abundant there, she was disappointed to meet the lack. “It has really increased my cost of living, since I don’t have the ability to cover the bdistance that others cover to get water.”

In 2022, UNICEF found that three in ten schools lacked access to basic water services, globally. Even in Malawian schools where crude water services were available in some schools, The Conversation noted in 2018 that disabled students were often blocked from benefiting, as a result of poor infrastructural designs. “Some of the water sources were as far as 350 meters away from the classrooms. None of the schools had access ramps to the pumps or supporting rails leading to the source. Some had steps leading to the water source which would be difficult for a child with physical impairments to access,” they reported.

Inept Policies

The sixth United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal advocates for clean and stable water supply and effective water sanitation for all people by the year 2030. But with just six years to the year, Africans with disabilities are less hopeful. They’ve described current water policies in the continent as exclusionary, emphasizing that their needs cannot be met without their active involvement in decision and policy making processes. “If you think about inclusion first, everybody will benefit,” Desmond highlighted.

In article 28 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which has been ratified by nearly 40 African countries, governments and their stakeholders are mandated To ensure equal access by persons with disabilities to clean water services. However, progress aimed at implementing the provision has been snail-walked.

Desmond says governments must, more than ever, accelerate efforts aimed at ensuring the full implementation of the provision. The efforts, he advised, must be in line with water conservation practices. But he was not always aware of water conservation. In his final high school year, a water conservation expert located him and other blind students in Bamenda, and started providing water for them. “First, he bought 210 Liter containers for each of us. He then started filling them with water once every week,” Desmond recounted. “When he started giving me the water, I had more time to study, eventually performing excellently at the GCE Advance Level.”

The Water Messiah/

This is the man who supplied clean water to Desmond Kum and 11 other visually impaired students, until the dawn of the Anglophone Crisis, a bloody conflict that has heat English Cameroon for the last seven years. His name is Dieudonne Tantoh Nforba, popularly known as Farmer Tantoh, and he is passionate about providing safe drinking water to vulnerable communities. Based in Northwest Cameroon, the water conservation expert who also serves as a consultant for several water initiatives across Africa, has built over 60 water projects in the region, enabling clean water access to more than 50000 inhabitants. “I didn’t always think about access to safe drinking water for people with special needs,” he told DNA.

He revealed that it was when Estela Seka traveled four hours from Kumbo to Bamenda, to come negotiate with him to provide water for her community, that he became moved. “She called me after listening to me on radio, and I directed her to come meet me, not knowing she was visually impaired,” he narrated. “When she came, I was marveled that somebody with visual impairment could have the mind to provide clean water to her community, and that was the beginning of it all.”

According to Farmer Tantoh, he would never have met those visually impaired students, without Estela. “Supplying them water gave me a lot of exposure and satisfaction,” he said. “I realized that access to clean water has to be inclusive, that whether people are crippled or handless, they should be able to get safe drinking water.”

The internationally acclaimed spring water conservation expert, who is a fellow of Ashoka and Making More Health, explained that water shortage is more severe for Africans with disabilities, despite the fact that they live in the same communities as others, because community water systems are always built with no regard for different disabilities. “This pushed me to design systems to ensure that if we’re building stand taps in communities, we should also make them inclusive, so that even if you’re on a wheelchair, you should be able to get water,” he announced.

With plans to resume the project of supplying water to students with disabilities underway, Farmer Tantoh says his ultimate goal is to create water projects that will maximize their health and independence. “If people drink clean water and they don’t contract diseases, then it also shows that I’m contributing to the global health sector,” he intimated.

Water is life.

This saying emphasizes not just the importance of water, but the fact that it ought to be made abundantly accessible to everyone, everywhere. To Farmer Tantoh, the problem is not that there’s water scarcity, the real problem is that people are not educated on basic water conservation techniques, such as rainwater harvesting, tree planting, and sustainable landscape design practices, like the planting of green lawns and the digging of infiltration ditches, to ensure that water is trapped and restored into the aquifers. “It will help shade water catchments and stabilize the water table, ensuring the continuous flow of water all year round,” he explained. As a local Innovator, he hopes to champion mass sensitization and action, ensuring that persons with disabilities are actively involved in all water conservation efforts. His plan, he says, is to combine indigenous and modern knowledge to make wells available to as many communities as possible. “Everybody needs clean water, even the aquatic organisms.”
B

Way Out/

While community innovators like Farmer Tantoh are contributing enormously to help everyone, including persons with disabilities to overcome the water crisis, a multi-stakeholder collaboration is necessary to keep the worsening situation under control. This inclusive collaboration, experts say, is something that can only be better initiated by African governments. When solidified, it would help overcome financial limitations, improve training of water conservationists, as well as accelerate the implementation of policies and the building of structures aimed at ensuring the supply of clean water for all persons, in the continent. For as long as it would take to get there, access to safely managed drinking water will remain a menace for Africans with Disabilities.

Editd by Kesah Princely