Decision Making Support for Urban Sanitation Planning & Design of Sanitation Systems and Technologies Peter Hawkins, World Bank – Water and Sanitation Program Sanitation is often low on the agenda of mayors, utilities and other related urban managers. By gathering credible information and presenting it in an easy-to-understand format, it’s often possible to demonstrate to decision-makers the importance of improving sanitation, and to guide them in defining priorities. In this module, we’ll look briefly at some useful ways of presenting information and how they have been successfully applied in practice. The fecal waste flow diagram, or SFD, is a way of visualizing how well, or how badly, the various sanitation service chains in a city are working. The width of the arrows represents the population contributing to each waste flow, and is thus a proxy for the potential hazard to public health and environmental quality. The green arrows represent safe excreta management, whilst the dark arrows represent unsafe flows. This type of diagram has proven very successful in communicating sanitation problems to decision-makers, including those who don’t have a technical background. This one was used in the context of a major multi-donor funded project to improve sanitation in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia. The project is based on a recently produced sanitation master plan, focused mainly on sewerage. The SFD was used as a tool in the dialogue between the utility and the donors to define the content of the project. It clearly shows that two thirds of the unmanaged fecal waste originates from unsafe manual pit emptying. On the basis of the diagram it was agreed that the project should address the upgrading of the latrines which make up the great majority of sanitation facilities in the city, to make them easier to empty hygienically; and the development of effective and affordable emptying services to substitute widely-used, unhygienic manual emptying. Another example of using the SFD comes from Balikpapan in Indonesia. This one was used in a city-level sanitation planning exercise led by the municipal planning bureau. It was projected onto the wall in a meeting with all the relevant municipal departments and used as a point of reference to identify issues, define actions and attribute responsibilities for resolving them. The SFD shows that almost half of the city’s toilets do not contain fecal material effectively, and so it ends up in the environment, particularly in groundwater and surface water. Of the remaining amount of fecal waste that IS collected, less than half arrives at the treatment plant, where treatment is seriously inadequate. On this basis, the planning team identified that the main priorities were to upgrade inadequate toilets, to improve emptying services, and to improve fecal sludge treatment. Aggregating the data to city level can hide important differences. In this example from Lima, Peru, the water and sanitation utility, SEDAPAL, has a political mandate to service informal settlements not served by the water or sewerage networks. The city-level SFD shows the vast majority served by sewerage, and the main problems are a degraded network and poorly functioning sewage treatment, which result in significant environmental pollution. However, if we look only at the 8% of the population who live in informal settlements, a completely different picture emerges. As Lima is a huge city, this 8% comprises about a million people, nearly all from the poorest strata of society. In these areas we see the need for a major improvement in the quality of the latrines and other on-site facilities used by these populations, and for the introduction of emptying services for these improved latrines. SEDAPAL is now working out how it will deal with these issues, which were previously left entirely to the informal sector and funded by the meager incomes of slum dwellers. This underlines the importance of making sure we understand the specific problems of the poor and other marginalized urban residents. Returning to Lusaka, we can see how the collection and analysis of data disaggregated to neighborhood or ward level can help in prioritizing sanitation interventions. This was done on the basis of an Urban Sanitation Status Index. In the case of Lusaka it was calculated that a survey of 1,500 households, stratified by neighborhood, provides statistically significant results on a neighborhood by neighborhood level. The index rates the performance of each step in the sanitation service chain in each neighborhood. In addition it includes complementary services such as drainage and solid waste management, which are intimately linked with sanitation outcomes. These subsets are aggregated using an algorithm based on expert opinions of the relative importance of pairs of factors or indicators, to calculate an overall sanitation status index by neighborhood, ranging from zero for very poor sanitation, to one for very good sanitation. In this case, an extra layer of information on groundwater vulnerability was added, as about half of the city’s water is abstracted from aquifers beneath the city. The overall results clearly illustrate the high priority for improving sanitation in the south-west quadrant of the city, where the sanitation index is lowest and the groundwater vulnerability highest. The index also indicates slightly lower priority areas for intervention in the north-east of the city. This Urban Sanitation Status Index has been used in defining and sequencing areas for sanitation improvements under the project. Economic factors are of course critical in decision-making on sanitation services. This example is taken from the municipality of eThekwini in South Africa, which is made up of Durban and its surrounding area. It has a rapidly growing population of about 3½ million people, distributed fairly evenly between high income and low income urbanized areas, and a large rural fringe. The municipal utility was obliged to meet the challenge of the constitutionally-defined right to a free minimum basic level of water and sanitation services. Sewerage is the most cost-effective solution in higher density areas, and is provided where there is formal land tenure, and therefore a stable urban layout. This corresponds to the “waterborne edge” in the map, and covers the main built-up area and a few satellite settlements. In dense, unplanned areas with informal housing, temporary facilities in the form of communal toilet blocks, maintained by the utility, are provided until such time as the areas are upgraded. In low-income, low density areas without on-plot water supplies, the utility provides on-site facilities which it empties every five years free of charge. Customers requiring any extra emptying pay for it at a commercial rate. VIP latrines were initially provided in these areas, but due to high solid waste inputs it was found that manual emptying was the only feasible method. The utility has therefore switched to using urine diverting dry toilets, which, although they are more expensive to build, produce almost pathogen-free compost, which can be emptied by the utility more cheaply than the sludge from VIP latrines, which has a higher volume and always contains fresh fecal material. Political buy-in from decision-makers is critical for sanitation planning, implementation and service provision, and the preceding examples show some of the ways they can be influenced. However, it is very important to ensure that there are proven and scalable sanitation intervention mechanisms in place, to spend the funds that are released when sanitation is prioritized by decision-makers. If such mechanisms are lacking, funds may be spent on ineffective interventions, results will be poor, and it will become harder to mobilize support for improving sanitation. This was an explicit consideration in the sanitation sector development program in Indonesia led by mid-level officials from the National Planning Bureau and supported by WSP, which we looked at earlier in this course. Initial work focused on developing a data collection and planning system in selected cities that was effectively aligned with institutional mandates and government budgeting and planning procedures. As a viable city-level planning and implementation model emerged, advocacy with higher level decision-makers was ramped up. As a result, new funding windows were created, and the Public Works Ministry realigned itself around an inclusive city-level sanitation agenda, which the upstream work had made feasible. This has created a virtuous cycle whereby local and national government investment in sanitation has risen over a decade from almost zero to the order of billions of dollars. To sum up then: We need local data and we have good tools available to collect and present this; we also need to look a bit behind those tools and to consider the economic aspects; and last but not least we need to address the needs of politicians who make the decisions.
