- In Yaoundé, fecal sludge contaminates neighborhoods where locals say the combination of insufficient sanitation and the costs of septic tank service lead to dumping in the streets.
- The city has just one fecal sludge treatment plant that receives up to double its capacity every day.
- City residents pinch their noses at the smells, while water contamination poses disease risks to local residents.
- Similar situations occur in other African cities that lack sanitation facilities capable of handling the needs of growing urban populations.
Major streets of Yaoundé, the political capital of Cameroon, have turned into open sewers. Every day, hundreds of cubic meters of liquid waste — enough to fill more than an Olympic-sized swimming pool each a week — overwhelm the city’s only fecal sludge treatment plant. That plant exceeds its capacity by 100% almost every day. As a result, sewers clog, streets turn into foul-smelling rivers and residents suffocate from unbearable odors that have become part of daily life.
In some neighborhoods, excessive human waste spills have turned into nightmares. Faced with this sanitary crisis, the city council is attempting to respond with promises of a new infrastructure — but the situation continues to deteriorate.
Stepping through excrement and enduring its stench: this is the reality for residents of Biyem-Assi, one of the most populous neighborhoods, with nearly 49,000 inhabitants, not far from the city center. People are forced to walk through sewers overflown with black, viscous, foul-smelling liquids dribbling in the streets. Pedestrians pinch their noses due to the smell. A junction in this neighborhood has even earned the nickname “Carrefour Caca,” meaning “Excrement Junction.” These relentless waste spills present health risks to residents, as fecal sludge contaminates the environment and nearby drinking water sources, which originally hails from the public water utility, known as CAMWATER. Hence, there are increasing the risks of epidemics in an already vulnerable country like Cameroon.
Nadine Pascaline Koagne, a call-box operator at Carrefour Caca, says she is compelled to wear a face mask all the time, despite the COVID-19 pandemic being long over. “We’ve been living with this for three to four years now. I live right at the entrance, across the street. We can’t stand these smells anymore. It’s unbearable, and makes us sick,” she says.
Despite efforts by locals in the area to clear the drainage channels, the problem persists. “Every time we try to unblock the gutters so that this mess can flow away, it just comes back. We don’t know what else to do,” says Kingsley Nkom, another resident.
Faulty infrastructure to blame?
Experts point to faulty infrastructure, noting in particular the social housing projects built in 1952 by the Cameroon Real Estate Corporation (SIC), a public company under the supervision of the Ministry of Housing, responsible for developing social housing for people on modest incomes, as part of national policy.
“This is a failure of the wastewater treatment systems in SIC housing estates,” explains Odilon Moumbe, a sanitation specialist who owns a sludge removal service in Yaoundé. “These settlements were originally equipped with wastewater treatment units meant to collect and process sludge from buildings. But decades later, these systems in these housing estates are obsolete. When the sludge is not treated, it backs up into the pipes and spills onto the streets,” he further explains.
Household waste is a widespread and growing problem in Yaoundé, and sludge is just part of it. The city generates approximately 1,310 tons of total waste per day, handled by a fleet of 40 compactor trucks (20 tons each), 10 tipper trucks (5 tons each), five multibin trucks, and two street sweepers. Despite these resources, waste collection and disposal remain insufficient to meet the needs of the city’s booming population.
Biyem-Assi is not the only neighborhood affected by this situation. In other dense and popular neighborhoods such as Mvog-mbi, located near the city’s administrative center and about 5 kilometers (3 miles) east of Biyem-Assi, locals say public buildings and shopping center owners illegally discharge their septic tanks into the streets. “There is also a problem of bad faith among some property owners. If your septic tank is full, you should call a sludge removal service,” Moumbe says. But, “No! They don’t, because they don’t want to pay for this service. Since Cameroonian cities lack proper sewer systems, when landlords refuse to empty their tanks, the waste inevitably overflows into the streets,” he says.
Emptying a large 10 m³ (2,640-gallon) septic tank in Yaoundé costs between 80,000 and 150,000 CFA francs ($140-$260), depending on the distance between the treatment plant and the site. To avoid these costs, some property owners secretly discharge their overflowing waste into street gutters, while, others wait for rain to use motorized pumps to flush their waste directly into drainage systems.
In Yaoundé, only a small percentage of households are connected to the sewerage system. Research in other urban areas, such as the Douala City Master Plan 2022, shows that even among households that are connected to a sewerage system, the majority remain exposed to unsanitary conditions like spillage of liquid waste, unpleasant smells, rupture of drainage channels and the proliferation of mosquitoes.
Furthermore, according to a 2021 national government survey of access to energy and sanitation, 28% of Cameroonian households do not have improved sanitation facilities (flush toilets, ventilated latrines, pit latrines with slabs or composting toilets), while 13% of rural residents and 1% of urban residents do not have sanitation facilities at all — meaning people practice open defacation in bushes, fields, beaches and other open areas.
These structural shortcomings exacerbate the health vulnerability of the country’s population. The lack of sanitation infrastructure in Yaoundé, like other areas, seriously exposes populations to water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery and malaria. In commercial areas, shopkeepers without access to sanitation relieve themselves in buckets or bags, which are then thrown into gutters or public garbage cans. In addition, many latrines are built without respecting biosafety standards, often close to wells, facilitating the infiltration of fecal matter into the water table, the main source of drinking water for the population.
The absence of sewage sludge treatment plants in most towns across Cameroon, with the exception of two (Yaoundé and Bangante in the west region), aggravates this environmental contamination.
This structural neglect is attributable to a lack of funds, inaction by town councils and the absence of penalties for failure to build toilets, explains Christine Flore Talla’a, a civil engineer and specialist in urban water and sanitation management who also runs a private sanitation company in Yaoundé.
Yaoundé’s only sludge treatment plant
Yaoundé residents primarily rely on septic tanks for managing fecal waste. It is an autonomous system, in which operators, organized into associations and economic interest groups, collect sludge across the city and transport it to the city’s only sludge treatment plant (STBV).
“With a geolocation system, trucks are tracked in real-time to prevent illegal dumping. This internal monitoring ensures that the waste is properly disposed of at the station,” says Raymond Sezawo, supervisor at Yaoundé Etoa STBV, located on the city’s southern outskirts.
However, the STBV, designed to handle just 265 m3 (70,000 gal) a day, is critically overloaded, receiving up to double the amount of sludge it was designed to handle. Every month, Sezawo says, approximately 15,000 m³ (nearly 4 million gal) of sludge is dumped at the facility. And the problem is growing, as is the city’s population — estimated at around 4.8 million. By 2035, this population could rise to around 5.5 million, due to rapid urbanization and increasing rural exodus.
Faced with this crisis, authorities acknowledge the urgency to develop long-lasting solutions. According to Sezawo, a new sludge treatment plant is planned for construction in the Soa industrial zone, on the outskirts of the city. In the meantime, efforts are being made to expand the capacity of the current STBV, operational since September 2021.
But the lack of adequate sludge treatment infrastructure does not justify illegal waste disposal. Also, the Yaoundé City Council has stepped up efforts to penalize building owners who engage in unlawful dumping. “To date, about 10 notices have been issued, along with significant fines, including a 1.6 million CFA franc [$2,775] penalty imposed on any offender. These measures aim to put an end to harmful practices and encourage responsible liquid waste management,” says Yannick Atangana, head of water and sanitation services at the Yaoundé City Council.
Recognizing the challenges posed by rapid urbanization, the municipality is promoting autonomous sanitation solutions. Property owners are encouraged to install functional septic tanks and have them regularly emptied. While this is only a temporary fix, it is considered more realistic, given the high costs and technical constraints of implementing a citywide sewage network in an already densely built-up urban area.
Yaoundé is not alone
Sanitation shortcomings are not just confined to Cameroonian cities. In Africa, other metropolises such as Dakar in Senegal, Lagos in Nigeria and Abidjan in Ivory Coast also have long struggled with groundwater contamination due to untreated wastewater. According to a 2022 report, “Financing Urban Sanitation in Africa,” more than half of human waste in Africa’s urban areas goes untreated, and previous research on five African cities showed that more than 50% of residents in those cities had no access to safe sanitation, meaning human waste was neither treated nor disposed of safely.
The report points fingers at the sector’s poor financing, emphasizing that it would take $10 billion a year in capital costs and $7.2 billion in operational and maintenance costs “to achieve basic sanitation across Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Banner image: Biyem-Assi is one of the most populous neighborhoods in Yaoundé, with nearly 49,000 inhabitants, not far from the city center. Image by Ludwig Tröller via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Citation:
Teikeu A, W., Edna Buhnyuy, V., Njeudjang, K., Assembe, S. P., Aretouyap, Z., & Njandjock Nouck, P. (2024). Combining statistical analyses and GIS-based approach for modeling the sanitary boundary of drinking water wells in Yaounde, Cameroon. Heliyon, 10(17), e36765. doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e36765
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