Welcome back. In the last presentation by Jonathan Parkinson, we explored some of the issues involved in city-wide sanitation planning and planning for urban sanitation at scale. In this module, we are going to dig a bit deeper and explore the local level. With local level, we mean the thousands of urban neighborhoods and communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America that are currently unserved or underserved with environmental sanitation services. We are specifically going to look at the household domain, and the community domain, the areas and settings where most people lead their daily lives in the urban areas of the developing world. The local level means areas like this here, in Kibera, Nairobi, one of the most notorious informal settlements in Africa, with high densities of over 1000 inhabitants per hectare. On the image here, shown in the middle, a first attempt at providing public sanitation services, a public toilet built together with the Wassa Program water and sanitation for the urban poor. What are the learning goals of this module? We want you to get to know the CLUES planning approach for environmental sanitation in urban low-income areas and we will also explore some of the linkages between city-wide and community level interventions. The most difficult spacial contexts to deal with are undoubtedly the rapidly expanding para-urban areas surrounding most cities and the informal settlements found in much of Africa, Asia and Latin America. These unplanned areas not only have poor access to developed services, they also exhibit dysfunctional institutions where government services hardly reach. Each spatial setting requires its planning approach. For rural areas, widely known today is the CLTS approach, Community Led Total Sanitation. For urban areas, we will be presenting CLUES, the Community Led Urban Environmental Sanitation planning approach, and finally, at city-wide level, the Sanitation 21 approach which Doctor Parkinson has explained in the modules before covering the entire urban sphere. Some few words about the Community Led Total Sanitation for rural sanitation. CLTS helps rural communities to collectively find solutions to their inadequate sanitation situation. In most cases, this means overcoming open defecation in the villages. Its focus is on igniting a change in sanitation behavior rather than constructing toilets. The approach is very much a community-driven one. It doesn't only focus on individual behaviors and the first significant step of CLTS is to put an end to open defecation. It starts by enabling people to do their own sanitation profile through appraisal, the observation, and the analysis of their practices of open defecation and the effects that these have on their lives. There are many existing planning frameworks, but we're highlighting only two state-of-the-art planning frameworks that are specific for urban settings. Sanitation 21, which was just presented by Jonathan Parkinson, and the CLUES approach which I will now present. CLUES has some common characteristics with CLTS, especially during the initial stages of the process. Both approaches seek to initiate stakeholder involvement by triggering collective action at the community level. However, the post-triggering process is quite different for both. For CLTS, it's all about sustaining behavior change and ending open defecation. For CLUES, this entails a structured planning approach that addresses the entire sanitation chain. Why is CLTS not the answer to urban sanitation? Firstly, urban complexity. There is often not the community cohesion found in rural settings. Secondly open defecation and toilet access is often not the main issue. Rather, it's a safe handling of human wastes. Thirdly, land tenure is a major issue in the urban sphere. Tenants cannot just build their own toilets where they like. Fourthly, unlike rural investments, urban environment sanitation is hugely expensive and must take an integrated approach, including issues like storm water drainage, greywater, or solid waste management to be effective. And lastly, neighborhood solutions need to be synchronized with the city-wide efforts and cannot be planned in isolation. Also, urban poverty has specific characteristics. First of all the level of commoditization. The poor living in urban slums have to pay rent. They must pay for basic services, for transportation getting into town to their place of work and for their food. Secondly, the environmental hazards. Most dense settlements suffer from inadequate water supply, environmental sanitation deficiencies, and high levels of environmental pollution. And lastly, the deprivation of urban poverty marked by urban and domestic violence, often accompanied by drug and alcohol abuse and insecure employment. These three levels of urban poverty make for quite a different set compared to rural contexts. Also, urban sanitation is a bit more complex than rural sanitation. We need to think about wastewater treatment, solid waste management, fecal sludge disposal, what happens with the greywater, what about the water supply in these dense urban areas, storm water drainage and the decision between on-site or off-site sanitation. These make for higher level of complexity of urban sanitation when compared to rural sanitation. In this slide, I present the four key CLUES principles. Firstly, CLUES places the neighborhood and community at the core of the planning process and, with this, it complements city-wide strategic planning. Secondly, it employs both expert and community knowledge. Thirdly, it encourages resource conservation and reuse, recycling, when and if possible. And fourthly, it is based on the concept of domains and tries to solve problems within the domain nearest to where the problems arise. To sum up, it is people centered, it involves a multi-stakeholder approach, it tries to come up with local solutions wherever possible, and lastly, it tries to promote environmental, sustainable solutions.
