A new report published by Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) and the Eastern and Southern Africa Water and Sanitation (ESAWAS) Regulators Association identifies how stronger regulators can play an important role in improving sanitation for under-served urban residents. The report, entitled Referee! Responsibilities, regulations and regulating for urban sanitation, has four key […]
This International Women’s Day, we are sharing some emerging findings from a research project to show how in sanitation, an equal world is an enabled world. For International Women’s Day last year, we wrote about a new research project examining the gender split of staff in Kenyan sanitation public institutions. These include utilities, government bodies […]
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 […]
As the Technical Director at Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company (NCWSC), Eng. Lucy Njambi is responsible for the operation of Nairobi’s water and sewerage systems, serving around 4 million people. She believes that it is important to involve women when developing services. “It’s important to include women, as they are the ones who suffer […]
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 […]
What does your ideal toilet look like? Gold-plated, maybe musical? Or a loo with a view? Whatever your personal idiosyncrasies, it’s unlikely that you’re imagining a toilet that you are forced to share with hundreds of other people throughout the day. But for that’s the reality for millions of people living in densely-populated urban areas […]
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 […]
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