Pursuing aspirations for decent sanitation work: How informal workers navigate the universe of rules that shape sanitation practices in urban Africa

This chapter provides a gendered understanding of how the ‘rules’ governing sanitation practices and work (ranging across laws, bylaws, and social norms) affect the realisation of aspirations for decent work expressed by off-grid sanitation workers. We draw on our research in three African cities (Beira in Mozambique, Freetown in Sierra Leone, and Mwanza in Tanzania) with women and men involved in paid and unpaid sanitation work. Our analysis highlights that formal law-based rules are biased towards ‘modern’ grid systems and simultaneously over-regulate and exclude off-grid paid sanitation workers, making their livelihoods ‘undecent’ (impossible, arduous, under-rewarded), while under-regulating unpaid sanitation work (predominantly performed by women), thereby reinforcing their invisibility and lack of protection. In contrast, community-based bylaws often enable the livelihoods of off-grid sanitation workers and the de facto practices that meet the sanitation needs of the majority of African urban dwellers, while not always advancing safe and healthy working conditions. In this context, we explore how sanitation workers actively negotiate and use these different systems of rules to pursue their aspirations for decent work, in ways which range from coping mechanisms to more transformative strategies, often through collective action.