Abstract
Global monitoring efforts do not provide a clear picture of the challenge of managing human waste at the city scale. Where cities do not provide universal access to publicly managed sanitation systems, households and communities find their own solutions resulting in a patchwork of approaches to removing human waste from places where people live. In dense urban environments, the absence of a coordinated approach can create serious public health problems. In the absence of comparable city-level data, we analyze primary and secondary data from 15 cities and 15 informal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Across these regions, our study finds that 62 percent of human waste is not safely managed. We also find that, while many cities have a proportion of households connected to sewers, none of the 15 cities safely manage human waste at scale. In the absence of sewers, on-site fecal sludge management systems place enormous responsibility on households and private providers, and unaffordable sanitation options result in risky sanitation practices.
Highlights
This paper analyzes the urban sanitation service provision gap in cities in the global South
To obtain a picture of city-level sanitation, we collected and analyzed existing secondary data and collected new data from 15 cities located in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America
Researchers in each city conducted an average of seven key informant interviews to fill in gaps where publicly available data were missing
Summary
This paper analyzes the urban sanitation service provision gap in cities in the global South. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 seeks to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sani tation for all,” and SDG target 6.2 aspires to “achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation by 2030” (UN DESA, 2017). Despite this goal, in 2017, in countries where sanitation data were available, global estimates report that only 47 percent of urban residents had access to safely managed sanitation (UNICEF and WHO, 2019). An important consider ation in densely populated urban areas is that improvements in house hold level sanitation facilities and practices have limited positive impacts on the overall health of the population if they fail to consider the potential for exposure along the entire sanitation chain (Berendes et al, 2020; Berendes et al, 2018; Mills et al, 2018; Robb et al, 2017; SuSanA, 2018)
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