For many African cities, offering a decent toilet to all urban residents and ensuring that all faecal waste is safely managed is an ambitious vision that will take years to achieve, unless there is a fundamental shift in the delivery of sanitation services. This shift is already happening in Kenya, where more than two thirds of the population do not have access to safe sanitation services. Counties and cities are starting to adopt inclusive sanitation in their quest to achieve universal coverage for their residents.

Malindi is leading the way in adopting Citywide Inclusive Sanitaton (CWIS) principles, demonstrating a pathway for other cities and towns to follow. This Practice Note outlines how Malindi stakeholders are collaborating to deliver a long-term plan for improving sanitation services and making CWIS a reality.

 

More information on the full CWIS plan from Sanivation

Read also: Towards cleaner and more productive Malindi and Watamu

More information on the wider CWIS initiative from World Bank

 

Women and girls living in Kenya’s low-income settlements frequently lack access to basic menstrual hygiene materials.

This Practice Note details the development of a business model for low-cost sanitary products in Naivasha, the setbacks encountered, and what WSUP has learnt from the pilot intervention.

Only 15% of Ghanaians use an improved household toilet, while nearly a quarter lack access to any household or shared facility. Inability to obtain finance is often cited as a key barrier.

Financial institutions offer toilet loans to help sanitation customers and providers bridge the gap, but uptake is low and businesses face wider challenges in providing affordable products.

This Practice Note considers how demand for sanitation financing products in Ghana could increase.

Chazanga Water Trust has provided an affordable, accessible and safe pit-emptying service to low-income customers in Lusaka since August 2014, the result of a partnership between Lusaka Water and Sewerage Company (LWSC) and WSUP.

This Practice Note explains the process behind LWSC’s recent price adjustment for its FSM service in Chazanga, and situates that within its wider journey towards becoming a viable and sustainable FSM model.

This Practice Note describes the design process behind development of a mobile app, Pula, inspired by GV’s Design Sprint method. Pula aims to support vacuum tankers with their business while providing urban planners with data about sanitation in the city.

See also: Integrating mobile tech into sanitation services: insights from Pula

Participatory Health and Sanitation Transformation (PHAST) is a behaviour change methodology designed to engage participants at every stage of the process of improving health, hygiene and sanitation behaviours. This Practice Note evaluates the early results of a Comic Relief-funded project that utilised PHAST in two neighbourhoods in Lusaka, and its integration into the response to cholera outbreaks in the city in 2016 and 2017-2018.

Since January 2016, WSUP Advisory and its partner GOAL have supported Freetown City Council (FCC) in its efforts to improve faecal sludge management services in Sierra Leone’s capital city.

This Practice Note provides an overview of project activities, challenges and results to date.

The Kenyan water and sewerage regulator, WASREB, has introduced a new Key Performance Indicator (KPI) mandating utilities to report their efforts to serve low-income areas. KPI 10 requires utilities to demonstrate their pro-poor strategies, mapping and engagement, now essential to placing highly in WASREB’s annual ranking.

This Practice Note outlines the 7-year process – driven by WASREB with long-term support from WSUP – that led to the KPI’s eventual introduction.

Master Operators (MOs) are small-scale semi-autonomous water providers who serve low-income areas in Kisumu, overseen by Kisumu Water and Sewerage Company (KIWASCO) through a Delegated Management Model.

MOs extend the supply network to many of the city’s poorer residents for a fair price and have helped to semi-regulate previously informal water services. However, they have a poor growth and performance record.

This Practice Note outlines KIWASCO’s management model and how these social entrepreneurs can improve their business sustainability while continuing to extend services to low-income customers.

This Practice Note outlines the development of a toilet database to support sanitation business development and public health monitoring in Lusaka.

Currently being tested in the peri-urban area (PUA) of Kanyama, the electronic database enables information on the ownership, location, quality and emptying history of local pit latrines and septic tanks to be stored in one place.

Blog: November 2017 – Innovations to combat the spread of cholera in cities