Country: Bangladesh

From climate adaptation efforts to a stronger push for better living conditions for women and girls, in 2021-2022 WSUP advanced further in its work providing clean water and decent sanitation and promoting appropriate hygiene in low-income urban communities.

Our 2021-2022 Annual Report shows the result of WSUP’s activities, benefitting more than 1 million people in the past year, across Africa and South Asia. In the period, we achieved:

618,418 people with improved water access;

580,730 residents with improved sanitation services;

168,454 people with improved access to good hygiene;

and mobilised more than $12 million in additional investment.

Lord Paul Boateng, WSUP’s chairman, wrote:

“In addition to our work with households and families, we are also investing more and more in providing clean water and decent toilets in schools, helping reduce student absences and improving the educational chances for children, particularly girls.”

Ed Mitchell, who in 2022 assumed the position of WSUP’s CEO, writes:

“Together with our supportive partners, we can take pride in what we’ve done so far, but we also need to raise our sights and ambitions to reach many more people in desperate need.”

Sanitation for all is a challenge particularly acute for low and middle-income countries. In the face of funding constraints, and a lack of political influence among those living in poorer areas, governments have tended to under-prioritise sanitation as a public investment
area.

Yet, countries have committed to the Sustainable Development Goal for sanitation. In doing so, governments have pledged to the Leaving no one behind principle, and to reaching the underserved as a matter of priority. A key question in this endeavour is which financing models can support governments’ ambitions for citywide sanitation.

This publication explores how high-quality sanitation can be financed in low-income urban areas in developing contexts. It is based on
findings from four research projects conducted under WSUP’s Urban Sanitation Research Initiative 2016–2020 (USRI), funded by UK Aid:

1. A research project led by the Aquaya Institute and conducted in five cities – Kisumu (Kenya), Nakuru (Kenya), Malindi (Kenya), Kumasi (Ghana), and Rangpur (Bangladesh) – identified the costs of sanitation services and the willingness-to-pay of poor urban households for those services (this research is referred to as SanCost in this paper);
2. A second research project led by the Aquaya Institute and which carried out a comparison of service models, financing models and willingness-to-pay for faecal sludge emptying services in Kisumu (Kenya);
3. A third research project by the Aquaya Institute that considered the willingness-to-pay of utility customers for a sanitation surcharge on the water bill to cross-subsidise sanitation for the poor in two Kenyan cities; and
4. Finally, a research project led by Dr. Charles Yaw Oduro (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology) and conducted in two districts in Ghana that examined policy-makers and taxpayers’ attitudes towards a sanitation surcharge on the property tax.