Multi-layered Trajectories of Water and Sanitation Poverty in Dar es Salaam

Abstract

Many cities in the Global South keep on expanding without adequate infrastructure leaving a large number of people to experience varying degrees of water and sanitation poverty. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has been subject to numerous interventions aimed at improving service provision across the city with mixed and overall limited results. Most of them are driven by popular definitions of urban water and sanitation poverty that portray the problem in a simplified way. It is often assumed that once people gain access to some form of improved access to basic services, this access is sustained over time. Instead, the urban poor experience differing journeys as they 'travel' in and out of water poverty but their trajectories are insufficiently understood. This chapter applies a relational approach to unfold a select number of trajectories from people living in a low-­-income community in Dar es Salaam. The stories illustrate how and why certain households and individuals are able to move out of urban water and sanitation poverty while others are not and thus offers insights into the dynamic interplay between individual and collective agency. This highlights different and changing degrees of urban water and sanitation poverty in a settlement and reveals the power dynamics that condition inequalities and shape people's trajectories over time. These narratives offer a nuanced and multi-­-layered understanding that challenges fixed universal approaches.