City-wide sanitation diagnostic tools and planning frameworks – Part 1 Welcome to the first of two modules on City-wide Sanitation Services: an Introduction to Diagnostic Tools and Frameworks. My name is Sanyu Lutalo, and I'm a Senior Water and Sanitation Specialist with the World Bank Group based in Washington D.C. In this module and the following module, we will introduce some systematic ways to understand and analyze the complex urban environments we often face when planning improvements in sanitation services. These two modules will introduce a number of issues related to sanitation planning, which we will explore more deeply later in the course. For sanitation services to be appropriate, affordable, and sustainable, we need to consider more than just the type of technology to be selected. In this module, we will explore some of these aspects, and we'll do so based on the principles of the sustainable development goals, or SDGs framework while looking at two broad aspects: urban sanitation services and public health and the need to consider integrated urban services. You may already be familiar with the sanitation services chain comprising waste containment, emptying, conveyance, treatment, and end-use or disposal. In practice, there are two major types of chain, which we can refer to as: networked, basically comprising sewerage systems with treatment plants, and non-networked, comprising on-site sanitation options with fecal sludge management. The millennium development goals, or MDGs, included targets to reduce the proportion of people without access to an adequate toilet. In other words, they focused on the containment part of the sanitation service chain. The sustainable development goals, or SDGs, however, set targets for universal access and monitor the whole sanitation chain including conveyance, treatment, and reuse or disposal. We will now look at how the sanitation service chain, when it is not working effectively, can contaminate the household toilet and the residential and/or urban environment, including local groundwater, posing a range of public health hazards. The sanitation chain is represented vertically on the left, and the hazard pathways can be summarized as follows. A dirty toilet is a threat to its users. A leaking tank, or pit, or a drain, or a sewer can pollute ground water. Unsafe emptying of a tank or a pit is a risk to the emptiers, to the household, and to the neighborhood. Contaminated drainage structures and leaking sewers add to the hazard of fecal contamination. And non-existent or poor treatment and/or inappropriate end-use and disposal of sewage, septage, and sludge results in a contaminated environment, in contaminated produce, and in contaminated water bodies. In such a contaminated environment, hazard becomes risk when people do not practice good hygiene, for example, by washing their hands with soap. This is all exacerbated by poor solid waste management, which allows garbage to further interfere with the proper functioning of sanitation services, and by uncontrolled land use, which makes planning and enforcement of the sanitation service chain even more challenging. And finally, when it rains, blocked drains, pits, and sewers overflow, and the wider environment is fecally contaminated. By analyzing the contamination routes in this way, we see where and why sanitation interventions are needed. For example, continuous monitoring and maintenance of the sewerage system, behavior change communication, and improved fecal sludge management may all be essential elements in a particular city. In the last slide, we saw the challenges that need to be addressed, whereas now we will look at the services which can address these challenges. There are five components to urban sanitation services. As you can see in the slide, latrines, septic tanks, and sewers are accompanied by solid waste and storm water management, as the latter two services are inseparable from the proper functioning of the fecal waste chain in a given town or city. Both sides of this diagram, the upstream services on the left, which typically interface with the households and other customer groups, and the downstream services, including treatment, disposal, and reuse on the right are impacted by the quality and enforcement of physical planning and of land use control. At the household level, housing tenure, and urban upgrading programs can also play an important part in advancing urban sanitation services. Likewise, treatment and appropriate reuse and disposal also contribute to reducing the public health risk and to improving the ecological environmental endowment of a city while increasing quality of life and city attractiveness and competitiveness. But poor management of these interrelated components often leads to the creation of a highly contaminated mixed waste stream in the drainage system. And when it rains, it just gets worse as flooding spreads this contamination far and wide across the city. To summarize, in this module, we have seen that sanitation is about a chain of services which will protect public health and the environment from fecal contamination and that there needs to be integration between the management of solid waste, drainage, onsite and network sanitation services. In the next module, you will learn about tools that can help us analyze the multiple complex technical and nontechnical factors involved in urban sanitation and how to prioritize them, and how urban sanitation is about services which are developed and implemented by both public and private sector entities.
