Abstract
In this paper, an expedited multi-criteria decision analysis framework, capable of tackling several dimensions for the choice of sanitation services, at an early planning stage is presented. The approach combines geographic information systems aided analysis for onsite solutions, with a multi-criteria decision analysis tool capable of suggesting and ranking several viable offsite treatment alternatives, according to the desired criteria. The framework was applied to four coastal cities in Northern Angola, one of the sub-Saharan countries of the west coast of Africa, thus obtaining an indication for city-wide solutions, as an aid to achieve the goal of ensuring full sanitation coverage in those four locations. It included possible onsite collection and storage interfaces, namely Ventilated Improved Pit latrines, fossa alterna, septic tanks or conventional sewer systems. The study also contributed to an informed decision regarding optimal offsite treatment facility type, namely based on dedicated or combined wastewater and faecal sludge treatment (co-treatment), as well as different options for locations and sanitation technologies. Alternatives were compared and ranked according to ten main criteria concerning social, economic, technological and environmental aspects. This work helped demonstrate the usefulness of decision-aiding tools in the multi-stakeholder and complex context of sanitation in a developing country.
Highlights
Urban sanitation can be broadly categorized under conventional drainage networks or as faecal sludge chains, which comprise sanitation solutions that are not connected to a sewerage system [3,4]
The main objective of the work presented in this paper is to demonstrate the development and application, to full scale case-studies, of a straightforward expedite multicriteria framework, capable of dealing with several aspects lacking in similar sanitationoriented multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) models found in the literature, such as:
For illustraquality of treated effluents comply with legislation thresholds, (e) minimize the impact tion purposes
Summary
In many regions of the world, and typically in sub-Saharan Africa, urban sanitation services are incipient and too often fail to provide sustainable and continuing benefits to its users [1]. Urban sanitation can be broadly categorized under conventional drainage networks or as faecal sludge chains, which comprise sanitation solutions that are not connected to a sewerage system [3,4]. The former are more common in urban settings in developed countries, while the latter can frequently be found in a large portion of the African continent and Southeast Asia.
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