How Much Will Safe Sanitation for all Cost? Evidence from Five Cities
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Date
2020
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Environ. Sci. Technol.
Abstract
: Global sustainable development goals call for universal
access to safely managed sanitation by 2030. Here, we demonstrate
methods to estimate the financial requirements for meeting this
commitment in urban settings of low-income countries. Our methods
considered two financial requirements: (i) the subsidies needed to bridge
the gap between the willingness-to-pay of low-income households and
actual market prices of toilets and emptying services and (ii) the amounts
needed to expand the municipal waste management infrastructure for
unserved populations. We applied our methods in five cities− Kisumu,
Malindi, Nakuru in Kenya; Kumasi in Ghana; and Rangpur in Bangladesh
and compared three to five sanitation approaches in each city. We
collected detailed cost data on the sanitation infrastructure, products, and
services from 76 key informants across the five cities, and we surveyed a
total of 2381 low-income households to estimate willingness-to-pay. We
found that the total financial requirements for achieving universal sanitation in the next 10 years and their breakdown between
household subsidies and municipal infrastructure varied greatly between sanitation approaches. Across our study cities, sewerage was
the costliest approach (total financial requirements of 16−24 USD/person/year), followed by container-based sanitation (10−17
USD/person/year), onsite sanitation (2−14 USD/person/year), and mini-sewers connecting several toilets to communal septic
tanks (3−5 USD/person/year). Further applications of our methods can guide sanitation planning in other cities.
Description
Keywords
Sanitation, Eloïse Charreyron, ACE: Energy and Environmental Sustainability, Ghana, Power, University of Energy & Natural Resources