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Introduction
Program Considerations
• Sanitation Planning and Tradeoffs
• Expanding Water Supply to Unserviced Neighborhood
• Technologies and Standards
• Financing and Cost Recovery
Bibliography
Key Contacts and Useful Websites
Introduction
In developing country cities, particularly in informal settlements and slums, sanitary and hygiene conditions stemming from the lack of adequate wastewater and human waste collection, treatment and/or disposal are dangerous and even life-threatening for the environmental health of urban residents and deteriorate the overall environmental quality of the urban area at large. While defining urban sanitation problems and devising their seemingly intuitive solutions may be less problematic than in other sectors of urban development, the hurdles involved in their planning and the tradeoffs implicit in their implementation challenge even the most able urban water and sanitation (W&S) authorities. Globally some 2.4 billion people do not have access to improved sanitation . Everyday as many as 30,000 people die from preventable water- and hygiene-related diseases. They affect at any given time almost half the urban population of developing countries. Annually more than 2 million people die from diarrheal diseases. Many millions more are debilitated, preventing them from being fully productive members of society. In urban areas, due to high rates of growth and population densities, the individual impact of poor sanitation and water-related diseases, as well as the overall impact on society, is even greater. Children and the urban poor are especially vulnerable to the public health problems stemming from poor sanitation and water-related diseases.
Despite large investments in wastewater collection and treatment systems, the number of unserved urban residents continues to grow. Wastewater collection and treatment is only one part of sanitation. In addition to improved water supply and wastewater collection, improved sanitation requires that "software" investments also be included. Programming aimed at changing sanitary and hygiene behaviors, such as hand-washing and proper disposal of children1s waste, greatly reduce morbidity and mortality rates from hygiene-related diseases, achieving public health impacts that are more immediate, cost-effective, and more equitably spread throughout society than from the adoption of wastewater "hardware" investments alone. Experience over the last few decades has shown that, because sanitation and wastewater treatment are inextricably linked as different parts of the same water supply and sanitation cycle, returns on investments in water and sanitation together are three times higher than investments made in either one sector alone. Institutional coordination, widespread stakeholder participation and collaborative, multi-sectoral partnerships are often required to achieve the maximum benefits from these initiatives.
Programming Considerations
Sanitation Planning and Tradeoffs
Urban sanitation planning, particularly for low-income or informal settlements, is difficult because of the tradeoffs implicit in the process. W&S authorities must develop a systemic view of their sanitation and wastewater needs and facilities in order to better prioritize sanitation problems and their solutions. The sanitation planning process requires authorities to plan for future urban growth while at the same time meet current sanitation needs to alleviate the environmental health problems associated with poor sanitation and hygiene conditions. Tradeoffs, such as foregoing short-term public health impacts associated with "software investments" for longer-term, more costly wastewater treatment facilities, exist because decisions must be made within the context of limited resources (financial, human and natural). Experience has shown that integrating systemic considerations, such as system financing, public-private partnerships, zoning, and participatory management, into the wastewater and sanitation planning process helps mitigate these trade-offs between short- and long-term costs and benefits. One way of doing this is to install sanitation and wastewater infrastructure to plan for and better control the direction of future growth. Although piped systems maybe more expensive than on-site treatment, on a large-scale such piped systems have a number of advantages including less impact on underlying groundwater sources. Should the decision be made not to use piped systems in the short-term, subsequent urbanization will make the installation of such systems at a later date much more expensive. While wastewater treatment facilities may be difficult to finance in the short-term, if the necessary sewage network is in place, the treatment plants can be developed later as financing allows. However, without the sewage/wastewater infrastructure network, developing the collection and treatment facilities becomes extremely difficult.
Technologies and Standards
The high costs of connecting urban neighborhoods to piped wastewater systems and treatment plants and the implicit tradeoffs therein have led cities, particularly informal settlements, to look for alternatives technologies for treatment for human wastes or other coping mechanisms which can favorably impact public health at lesser expense. Local development authorities often turn to alternative technologies such as:
- on-site dry latrines, ventilated improved pit latrines, and pour flush latrines,
- stabilization ponds (an alternative suitable only for smaller urban areas due to their extensive land requirements),
- small-bore sewer (solids collected in an on-site tank; only liquid effluents are passed through sewer system allowing much simpler construction—smaller pipes, laid at flatter gradients, and fewer manholes)
- shallow-piped sewage systems (perhaps in conjunction with a small-bore sewer),
- condominial maintenance of sewer pipes by blocks of households (before the pipes reach the street system); and
- re-use of treated wastewater for agriculture and aquaculture, among others.
W&S providers often view informal urban settlements as illegal and thus, avoid community consultation regarding willingness to pay for, use and maintain different types of alternative technologies and sanitation systems. However, community involvement has proved critical in the acceptance of innovative solutions. For example, a slum community in Mexico manages its household wastewater by putting black water from toilets in a tank first, then in a decomposition chamber with household garbage; they make money from selling the resulting sludge as fertilizer. Alternative technologies, in order to achieve success, must be consultative and participatory for all stakeholders.
Appropriate standards governing sewerage discharges from sanitary collectors, wastewater treatment plants, stabilization ponds, etc. involve important public health and environmental protection considerations in choosing the right technical solutions and their related design and OM costs. For developing countries and their cities with tight budgets, achieving improvements in effluent discharge quality must be weighed against alternative uses for the same funds within the sanitation sector. Life cycle costs and benefits of using more advanced technologies and standards should be weighed in deciding such issues as whether to adopt primary, secondary treatment standards; to expand basic sewage collections systems for universal coverage; finance construction of selected on-site sewage disposal systems; or to separate wastewater from storm water runoff. Toxic wastes and harmful byproducts of industry are an additional problem for cities. Left untreated, they damage public health and the quality of life for both human populations as well as life sustaining ecological systems. In addition, industries often dump their wastes into municipal collection systems, damaging treatment systems designed for household or other types of wastes, and shifting remedial costs from industry to taxpayers at large. Economic incentives can encourage industry to clean itself up, backed by regulations that require industrial and agricultural polluters to bear the costs of meeting discharge standards.
Financing and Cost Recovery
Universal piped wastewater sanitation is expensive - simply maintaining the current percentage of urban population with access to improved sanitation over the next 15 years will require extending access to over 800 million urban residents. However, piped wastewater systems may be too costly to apply on a wide-scale, particularly in informal urban settlements, due to the infrastructural and geographic cost constraints as well as the relatively cost-prohibitive hook-up expense for individual households without the capacity to pay. As a result, many countries assign a lower priority for sanitation, partly as a result of the high investment costs and partly because of the lower perceived benefits (individual and societal) of sanitation services compared to water supply investments. As a result, global sanitation investment expenditures are lower in comparison to water supply; comprising only 20% of the total invested in the water and sanitation development sector.
Wastewater discharges are hard to measure; so household wastewater tariffs often are added to the price of water. Many of the public health benefits of wastewater collection and improved sanitation are external benefits accruing more to the city or region-at-large than to the individual household. As a result, individual users may be reluctant to voluntarily pay the full cost of wastewater service, as is the case for drinking water connections. This requires special care in wastewater tariff design. Individual household connection charges, for example, should be kept low, so as to encourage all households to connect to piped wastewater systems that already have been installed. Full costs of the combined water and wastewater systems can still be recovered through the tariff structure (See Water Supply Brief). Therefore, there is a need to efficiently incorporate subsidies within wastewater tariff structures. Furthermore, holding not only industrial polluters but also household polluters to some variant of the "polluter pays" principle is essential. This implies that significant point sources of pollution, like factories or other upstream pollutants (See Regional Development brief), either have to provide for their own cleanup, before discharging into public water bodies, or must pay fines or other charges to cover the costs to local or regional governments performing these cleanup operations.
Bibliography
- Cairncross, Sandy and Richard Feachem. 1993. Environmental Health Engineering
- in the Tropics. New York and London: John Wiley and Sons.
This book describes the infectious diseases in tropical and developing countries and the environmental measures that may be used effectively against them. The infections described include the diarrhoeal diseases, the common gut worms, guinea worm, schistosomiasis, malaria, bancroftian filariasis and other mosquito-borne infections. The environmental interventions that receive most attention are domestic water supplies and improved excretal disposal. Appropriate technology for these interventions, and also their impact on infectious diseases, are documented in detail.
- Collignon, Bernard and Marc Vezina. 2000. Independent Water and Sanitation Providers
- in African Cities: Full Report of a Ten-Country Study Water and Sanitation Program. World Bank Partnership. http://www.wsp.org/pdfs/af_providers.pdf
This report consolidates the results of a survey of independent water and sanitation operators in ten sub-Saharan nations. The study suggests that by recognizing and regularizing the activities, roles, and institutional position of independent providers, and by facilitating intermediation, coordination, and partnership between city-wide operators and independent providers, municipal and national authorities can set the stage for better delivery of water and sanitation services to the urban poor.
- Department for International Development (DFID). 1999. "Guidance Manual
- on Water Supply and Sanitation Programmes." http://www.lboro.ac.uk/well/resources/books-and-manuals/guidance-manual/guidance-manual.htm
The DFID commissioned this Guidance Manual from the WELL Resource Centre to assist staff and partners to develop effective and sustainable water supply and sanitation programs. The Manual comprises three chapters and appendices. These take the reader from an overview of the sector, through specific development perspectives, to detailed recommendations for each stage of the project cycle.
- Economist (The). 2002. "Sustainable Development: A Few Green Shoots"
- The Economist Aug. 29, 2002 http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1301796
The article discusses the issues and challenges being addressed in the World Summit in Johannesburg, including the role of the United States in global environmental policies, farm subsidies, improving water and sanitation around the world, and public-private partnerships in economic development.
- Gleick. 2002. Dirty Water: Estimated Deaths from Water-Related Disease 2000-2020.
- The Pacific Institute http://www.pacinst.org/reports/water_related_deaths.htm
The report looks at three different scenarios and concludes that even if we achieve the United Nations Millennium Goals, which aim to cut the proportion of people without clean drinking water by half, 34 to 76 million people could perish over the next twenty years.
- OECD/DAC. "DAC Reference Manual on Urban Environmental Policy."
- http://www1.oecd.org/dac/urbenv/Shaping.html
The reference manual highlights the potential contribution of sound urban-environment management to both environmental and development goals or, in the words of the Brundtland Commission, to development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need". It suggests that improving environmental management can contribute directly to better living conditions, notably for the poorest, while stimulating balanced socio-economic development in urban centers, peri-urban areas and surrounding regions. The manual aims to provide advice for development co-operation agencies and their counterparts in parnters' countries in their efforts to address urban environmental problems.
- OECD/DAC. "Shaping the Urban Environment in the 21st Century."
- http://www1.oecd.org/dac/urbenv/dac-s21c_fulldoc.pdf
The document provides a discussion of how environmental policy is located within broader environment and development goals, a rationale as to why donors should invest in the urban environment, a framework that integrates a concern for environmental management and planning in urban areas within sustainable development goals, examples of how donors support urban environmental improvements and the lesson learned from their experiences, and a basic reference on the urban environment with the contents list allowing users to find particular topics.
- PADCO. "Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Programming Guide"
- http://www.makingcitieswork.org/urbanws/Guide/guide_print.pdf (in addition to the manual, the document contains a comprehensive bibliography: see section IV)
This WS&S Guide provides a concise overview of strategic issues, planning processes and implementation practices. The objective is to identify major activities and components of successful programs and some first-order principles to guide the design and implementation of WS&S programs. The Guide is intended for those who are making plans and must establish the enabling environment for successful program implementation.
- Sanitation Connection. http://www.sanicon.net (A consortium of sanitation
- and water international development organizations. The website produces short technical briefs on many related topics.) The following themes, among others, are relevant: 'Institutional Development,' Policies and Strategies,' 'Urban,' 'Health and Social,' 'Sanitation Promotion' and 'Wastewater Reuse.'
- UNEP. "State of the Environment and Policy Retrospective: 1972-2002"
- in Global Environmental Outlook 3. 240-269. http://www.unep.org/GEO/geo3/index.htm
The documents highlights various thematic issues—including socio-economic trends, land, forests, biodiversity, freshwater, coastal and marine areas, atmosphere, urban areas, and disasters?showing trends over the past three decades at the global level then at GEO regional level: Africa, Asia and Pacific, Europe, Latin American and the Caribbean, North America, West Asia, and the Polar Regions. The analysis uses the 1972 Stockholm Conference as the baseline, discussing the evolution of the issue and how the international community has tried to address the problems.
- Wegelin-Schuringa, Madeleen. "Strategic Elements in Water Supply and
- Sanitation Services in Urban Low-Income Areas." International Water and Sanitation Centre. http://www.irc.nl/themes/urban/elements.html
The document introduces strategic elements that affect the viability and sustainability of all activities aimed at improving basic infrastructure services (including water supply, sanitation, solid waste collection and drainage) in urban low-income areas and provides some key options for action to address them in practice.
- WHO/UNICEF. 2000. Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report.
- World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund. http://www.unicef.org/programme/wes/pubs/global/gafull.pdf
This report presents the finding of the fourth assessment by the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, the overall aim of which is to improve the planning and management within countries by supporting countries in monitoring the water and sanitation sector and provide global assessments of the water supply and sanitation sector. The report updates and consolidates findings of earlier reports through the use of broader and verifiable data sources.
- World Bank. January 2001. "Urban Environmental Priorities."
- Environment Strategy Background Papers. http://www.worldbank.org
This report provides background information in the World Bank's comprehensive effort to develop a corporate environmental strategy, highlighting the strategies set for by the World Bank publication, Livable Cities for the 21st Century. The strategies include: to make cities livable: basic environmental services for the urban poor; cleaner air, cleaner water, healthier cities; and finance for people in cities.
- World Bank Water and Sanitation Program. "The Challenge of the Urban Poor."
- http://www.wsp.org/english/focus/urban-depth.html
The webpage addresses issues in providing urban services to the poor. Topics include: community level institutional innovations, the special case of technology in sanitation and water supply solutions, creating incentives for change (innovating while protecting the poor), and access to information - inclusive consultative processes
Key Contacts and Useful Websites
- DEC (Development Experience Clearinghouse) - an online database of over
- 15,000 USAID documents and reports. Search for ?urban1 and ?water1 http://www.dec.org
GARNET http://info.lut.ac.uk/departments/cv/wedc/garnet/grntacti.html Global Applied Research Network: GARNET is a mechanism for information exchange in the water supply and sanitation sector using low-cost, informal networks of researchers, practitioners and funders of research. Select: links, resources or archive
- InterWater: Internet Gateway to Water and Sanitation Information
- http://www.wsscc.org/interwater/
InterWater offers information about more than 600 organizations and networks in the water supply and sanitation sector, related to developing countries.
- IRCDOC - an internet-based bibliographic database on water supply and
- sanitation in developing countries. http://www.irc.nl/products/documentation/ircdoc/search.html
Pacific Institute (The); http://www.pacinst.org ; an independent, non-profit center created in 1987 to conduct research and policy analysis in the areas of environment, sustainable development, and international security.
- UNESCO Water Portal. http://www.unesco.org/water/
- The UNESCO Water Portal is intended to enhance access to information related to freshwater available on the World Wide Web.
- UNICEF/WES (UNICEF1s Water Environment and Sanitation Dept. and their website).
- http://www.unicef.org/programme/wes The website provides information concerning UNICEF/WES1s efforts with regards to child rights, women, the urban poor, school sanitation and hygiene, andchildren and the environment
- USAID Office of Urban Programs. http://www.makingcitieswork.org Jeff Boyer
- This Making Cities Work website is designed to inform USAID staff, counterparts and other partners in their efforts to integrate an urban focus into their work.
- USAID Water Team, Alan Hurdus - Principal Team Coordinator,
- 202-712-0218, alhurdus@usaid.gov
Water Supply & Sanitation Collaborative Council. http://www.wsscc.org/
The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council is a leading international organization that enhances collaboration in the water supply and sanitation sector to accelerate the achievement of sustainable water, sanitation and waste management services to all people, with special attention to the unserved poor, by enhancing collaboration among developing countries and external support agencies and through concerted action programs.
- Water, Engineering and Development Centre.
- http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/cv/wedc/index.htm
WEDC is one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the planning, provision and management of physical infrastructure for development in low- and middle-income countries.
- Water and Environmental Health at London & Loughborough.
- http://www.lboro.ac.uk/well/
WELL is a resource center network providing services and resources in water, sanitation and environmental health for the Department for International Development (DFID) of the British government and partner agencies.
- Water, Environment and Sanitation, UNICEF http://www.unicef.org/programme/wes/
- UNICEF has been involved in water, environment and sanitation (WES) issues since the 1960s and has supported long-term WES programming initiatives in some 90 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas.
- World Bank Group (The). Water Supply and Sanitation Program.
- http://www.wsp.org/ (an international partnership of the world's leading development agencies concerned with water and sanitation services for the poor) and http://www.worldbank.org/watsan/ (supplies links to World Bank publications, projects, events, and updates with regards to water supply and sanitation). Also the Water Resources Management Group:
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/essd/essdext.nsf/18ParentDoc/
WaterResourcesManagement?Opendocument (This site serves as the World Bank1s central organizing point for water-related issues, addressing water as a resource in its many dimensions, serving to assess and disseminate emerging lessons and shared experiences, publicize policies and guidelines, facilitating cooperation on water issues, and addressing issues of knowledge generation, management, and enhancing skills) and Walter Stottman, Water Supply and Sanitation Program wstottman@worldbank.org
- World Health Organization (WHO). Water and Sanitation Group.
- http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/index.html (WHO1s web page providing links to various topics under water sanitation)
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