Experiential approaches to sanitation-goal assessment: Sanitation practices in selected informal settlements in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since 1977, the World Health Organisation has published global sanitation goals, targets and plans of action, all using numbers and ratios to assess success. Governments have done similarly. Such assessments ignore how informal settlement residents use and manage toilets and how sanitation practices reveal shortcomings in local authorities’ attempts to assess success in meeting sanitation-provision challenges. Using ethnographic data gathered between 2013 and 2014 in four Cape Town informal settlements, the article describes residents’ on-the-ground sanitation practices. It shows how those practices have limited or precluded some people’s access to facilities ostensibly provided for all; how socio-political factors lead to sanitation practices that thwart public health goals; and how such practices reflect popular aspirations to citizenship whilst undermining local authorities’ systems. Challenging numbers-based claims about the extent of sanitation access, the article suggests a need for ethnographic and functional experiential-behavioural modes of assessment.