Who Speaks for Sanitation?

Co-written with Sarah Lebu 

For Africa Day, let's talk about language in sanitation.

Sanitation is a human right—but who decides what that means, how it's delivered, and whose needs come first? 

Across Africa, critical decisions about sanitation investment, practices, and hygiene are still made in colonial languages (French, English, and Portuguese) that many people can’t fully understand. This blog looks at how language—often overlooked—continues to shape who gets heard and who gets left out in the WASH sector.

What if we flipped the script? What if African languages became tools of power, not exclusion?

An AI-generated image with words in Luo that mean "African Intelligence"

Still speaking in the colonizer’s tongue

Ghanaian professor and pan-African author Kwesi Kwaa Prah once said, “No country can grow by using a borrowed language that only a few people understand.” He was talking about how important it is for African countries to use African languages, not just colonial ones like English, French, or Portuguese, especially when making development decisions. He pointed to global efforts like the Millennium Development Goals (now called the Sustainable Development Goals), designed to transform the world through sustainable, inclusive development. 

The national policies that result from these goals are in the languages of the former colonizers. Colonizer languages often do not resonate with the people most affected by these policies. This disconnect in language prevents meaningful participation, ownership, and, ultimately, impact. When local people cannot understand or shape the decisions that affect their health and dignity, the promise of development remains unfulfilled.

This is not a new story. During colonial rule, European powers systematically suppressed African languages and replaced them with English, French, or Portuguese. This linguistic domination wasn’t accidental—it was deliberate and strategic. This action erased indigenous cultures, controlled knowledge, and concentrated authority in the hands of the colonizers. Scholar Hisham Muhamad Ismail talks about how colonial regimes used language to “civilize” Africans, forcing colonizer languages to overwrite local traditions and cultures, and to maintain control over land, labor, and leadership. Others, like Avoulette and Kimble, describe how France institutionalized this practice through La Francophonie, a network that aimed to promote the French language and culture across its former colonies. 

Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

One powerful act of resistance came from Kenyan author and activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In 1977, he co-created a play entirely in his mother tongue, Gikuyu. The play challenged the inequalities of postcolonial Kenya and was so politically provocative that Ngũgĩ was imprisoned. Undeterred, he wrote a novel in Gikuyu—Caitaani Mũtharaba-Ini—on prison-issued toilet paper. It was later translated into English as Devil on the Cross. His defiance became a literary and political symbol of the power of language in reclaiming African thought, identity, and agency. Today, this resistance is still felt. For example, many Francophone African countries have begun shedding French as their official language, signaling a broader movement to restore linguistic sovereignty.

The invisible wall in the sanitation workforce

One of the most insidious and under-discussed remnants of colonial power in sanitation development is language. A 2023 article by Lue et al argues that English continues to dominate research, funding, and policy conversations in the WASH sector. For many researchers in low—and middle-income countries, this creates an enormous barrier to contributing to the field—not because their ideas lack rigor, but because they are locked out by language. 

The authors interviewed several researchers who described how English acts as a gatekeeper: favoring those trained in elite Western settings and marginalizing those most embedded in the local contexts the research aims to serve. One observed that international teams often prefer English-speaking field staff, even when those staff struggle to connect with or understand the communities they are studying. 

Language as legitimacy 

Language fluency—not lived experience—becomes the currency of legitimacy.

The cost of publishing in English is not just linguistic—it’s financial. Journals often expect submissions to meet high standards of Western academic writing, which many local researchers cannot afford without costly editing services. 

Even when journals claim to accept submissions in other languages, such work rarely gains visibility in global policy or academic circles. The pressure to publish in English limits access and perpetuates the colonial hierarchies the field claims to challenge.

The problem extends to how ideas are shared and who gets to be in the room. Sanitation-focused conferences in Africa are still routinely held in English or French—the languages of colonizers—without translation into local languages. This effectively excludes grassroots participants from engaging in spaces where policies are shaped and partnerships are forged. When communities can’t speak, they can’t be heard. And when they can’t be heard, they can’t lead.

Breaking the language barrier 

Can language be a force for decolonization in Africa’s sanitation sector? 

African language families (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Can language help shift power over decision-making, funding, and priority-setting, from high-income, headquartered organizations and white-led institutions to local leaders rooted in the communities they serve? 

Today, most African countries continue to use colonial languages as their official language, making English, French, and Portuguese the primary languages of education, governance, and development. Yet fewer than one in five Africans speaks these languages fluently. Among rural and low-income communities—the very populations most affected by sanitation challenges—this number is even smaller. This linguistic gap creates a profound disconnect between those crafting sanitation policies and those living with their consequences.

Reclaiming African languages is not a symbolic act. Rather, it is an act of re-centering African voices at the heart of sanitation narratives, policies, and research. It is a way to center the lived realities, knowledge systems, and leadership of African people in shaping their sanitation futures. 

To decolonize sanitation, we must return the voice to those systematically sidelined. This means making space for African languages in every layer of the sanitation ecosystem: from community consultations to academic journals, from policy debates to donor reports, from the village council to the global conference stage.

We call on:

• Donors and international agencies to fund translation, interpretation, and local-language engagement as a core part of project design, not as a luxury or afterthought;

• Academic journals and WASH conferences to publish and host in African languages, and to provide affordable language editing support so that brilliant ideas don’t die at the door of English grammar;

• African governments and institutions to center indigenous languages in sanitation policies, education, and research, making them accessible to the communities they serve; and

• WASH professionals and researchers to actively challenge language hierarchies in their work—by collaborating with local communicators, valuing lived experience as much as elite training, and supporting colleagues to write and present in the languages they are most fluent in.

Let us not just speak about communities. Let us speak with them, in their own words.