Accessing the status of clean drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene remains a challenge in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The current article contributes to the progress made by the WASH initiatives in ten SSA countries in eliminating open defecation by 2030, using theoretical data from 2017 to 2019. The authors used regression trend estimation to observe that rural and urban population growth had a statistically significant detrimental influence on the elimination of open defecation by 2030. According to the predicted data model, by 2030-2035, the urban population of SSA would be 65, 25, and 10 million in all the three categories of income groups. An increase in the number of modern pit users (C1) shows no improvement at the annual rate of change. The unimproved toilets and open-pit latrines (C2 and C3) show a linear growth rate, which expanded over time. Population growth, higher unemployment, and teen pregnancies contribute to this increase. Under current conditions, the curve of modern pit latrine users will increase linearly. Nigeria has the most significant number of spread pit latrine users, which has decreased linearly from 25 to 20% since 2017. It was evident that the power-law trend in Nigeria would increase the usage of unimproved pit latrines and open-pit latrines. Ghana had the highest rate (50%) of open-pit latrine users, while the data show that this situation remained stable (2001-2017). In the Democratic Rep. Congo, annual rates increased linearly from 25 to 33% (2000-2017), while Burundi was one of the countries in the region with the lowest number of open-pit latrine users, although the annual rate has increased from 6.13 to 11.75% since 2017 to 2019.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10668-022-02620-z.
Keywords: Rural–urban population growth; Sanitation success; Statistical analysis; Sub-Saharan Africa; Theoretical modeling; WASH-related diseases; Water, sanitation, and hygiene.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.