Sewage shovelling plays vital role in Kenyan slums

NAIROBI, Apr 30 (Reuters) Paul Mburu Karanja points to the banks of rubbish lining the slime-green waters flowing through Kenya's Kibera shantytown.

''We pour the waste into the river to take it away, but at a time of dryness like now when the water is so low, the rubbish just sticks there,'' says Karanja, 30, who has been removing human waste in Kibera since 1987.

Karanja is one of around 70 ''manual exhausters'' who are paid by residents to empty latrines and sewage pits in east Africa's biggest slum, a ramshackle settlement of tin-roof shacks.

The problems in Kibera -- made famous as a backdrop to the blockbuster movie ''The Constant Gardener'' -- are repeated across the continent.

Some 300 million Africans lack access to safe drinking water and 313 million do not have basic sanitation. The United Nations has set a target to halve these numbers by 2015 -- an ambitious target given that Africa is urbanising so rapidly that half its population is expected to live in cities by 2030.

Less than 50 per cent of Kenya's 32 million people have access to clean water and sanitation, the government says.

Karanja lives the reality behind such impersonal statistics.

Dumping into rivers and streams is one of the few waste management options for people in the slums of Kenya, still woefully lacking in infrastructure despite being east Africa's richest nation.

Piped water and flush toilets are a dream for most in Kibera, where residents step gingerly around trenches of steaming sewage.

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