Progress on Sustainable Development Goal for Sanitation and Hygiene in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 6.2 focuses on ensuring that everyone has access to adequate sanitation and hygiene services by 2030. This study harvested data from the 2021 Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) report of the SDG target 6.2 to assess the progress on sanitation and hygiene in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries. The sanitation and hygiene data for countries in SSA were extracted and analyzed to determine the progress towards the attainment of the SDG target 6.2. The analyses revealed that the rate of annual progress for at least basic sanitation (0.50%) and basic hygiene services (0.22%) in SSA from 2015 to 2020 was very low. However, the t-test results showed that there were significant differences in the proportion of the population using at least basic sanitation (t₄₇ = -7.910, p = .000, α = 0.05), open defecation (t₄₇ = 6.517, p = .000, α = 0.05) and basic hygiene (t₃₆ = -3.830, p = .000, α = 0.05) services from 2015 to 2020. In spite of the t-test results, the projected coverage for basic sanitation and basic hygiene services by 2030 were 38% and 28.2%, respectively, which showed that SSA might miss the SDG target 6.2, if urgent measures are not taken to address the situation. It is therefore recommended that a detailed audit of the sector should be carried out in each country to identify areas that need urgent interventions and scale up of activities.