The MapSan trial was a major 4-year research project which aimed to evaluate the health impacts of a shared sanitation intervention delivered by WSUP in the slums of Maputo. It’s the largest ever high-rigour study of the health impacts of urban sanitation. And now the long-awaited results are out. By Guy Norman, WSUP’s Director of […]
In a previous blog post back in January, we described the start of a research project which is aiming to assess and model how faecal pathogens move through the environment in a low-income urban community in Dhaka in Bangladesh. By Guy Norman, WSUP’s Director of Research and Evaluation It’s one of our three biggest projects […]
Improving sanitation in slum communities is a complex challenge. Particularly challenging is working out how it can be financed. By Guy Norman, WSUP’s Director of Research and Evaluation Now if you believe that subsidy is a Bad Thing or just ain’t ever gonna happen, you might approach slum sanitation by first assessing what slumdwellers are […]
In Kisumu, Kenya, the majority of households rely on pit latrines but most pit emptiers do not work safely – which is bad for the customer, the neighbourhood, and the emptiers themselves. This lack of adequate services is an opportunity for those who can deliver safely managed sanitation services to customers, including those in low-income […]
In many cities, people’s living and working environments are contaminated by huge amounts of untreated faecal waste. We know that excreta (human and non-human) is incredibly dangerous for health. But the pathogens found in faecal waste (i.e. the micro-organisms that cause diseases like diarrhoea, typhoid and hepatitis) have very complex patterns of movement through the […]
About 18 months into the Urban Sanitation Research Initiative, and we’re starting to see emerging findings and the beginnings of policy impact. 18 months is about the gestation period of an elephant: so we’re in baby elephant phase, but planning to make a pretty big stomp in the not-too-distant future! If you explore the Urban […]
A government minister’s signature at the bottom of a newly passed bill can be the result of years of concerted effort from numerous stakeholders. But that signature doesn’t automatically translate into sustained change on the ground, which is where it matters. This is the situation in urban Ghana, where public toilets continue to be a […]
In this blog post, I wanted to draw people’s attention to some fascinating recent commentary by Ian Ross around sanitation costings. Ian’s an ex-OPM consultant, now taking time out with LSHTM to do a PhD looking at costs of sanitation: so he’s able to put a lot of his considerable brainpower into thinking about this, […]
Kenya’s National Water Master Plan envisions 80% national sewerage coverage by 2030 – ambitious, as only 35% of urban Kenyans currently have access to basic sanitation. Motivated and influential stakeholders like the Water Services Regulatory Board (WASREB), the body in charge of overseeing national water and sewerage policies and strategies, have a financial mountain to […]
Who should pay for sanitation? The consumers who use the service, the utilities in charge of providing it, or governments who are responsible for ensuring citizens can access safe facilities? Consumers pay to connect their homes to a sewer network, utilities use that cash to cover the costs of staffing, upkeep, operations and maintenance and […]
Keep up to date by signing up to receive our newsletter.
Signing up means that WSUP will add you to the distribution list for our newsletters, which we send out approximately every six weeks. We will never pass your details onto third parties, and you can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in a newsletter.