Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities

Local Action for Global Goals

Un-Habitat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781844070046
• eBook ISBN: 9781136546914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'This is surely the most impressive and important publication to come out of the UN system for many years.'
Peter Adamson, founder, New Internationalist, and author and researcher of UNICEF's The State of the World's Children from 1980 to 1995

The world's governments agreed at the Millennium Summit to halve, by 2015, the number of people who lack access to safe water. With rapidly growing urban populations the challenge is immense.

Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities is a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of the problems and how they can be addressed. This influential publication by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) sets out in detail the scale of inadequate provision of water and sanitation. It describes the impacts on health and economic performance, showing the potential gains of remedial action; it analyses the proximate and underlying causes of poor provision and identifies information gaps affecting resource allocation; it outlines the consequences of further deterioration; and it explains how resources and institutional capacities - public, private and community - can be used to deliver proper services through integrated water resource management.

Provision for
Water and Sanitation
in Cities

Introduction

This chapter reviews the quality and extent of provision for water and sanitation in urban areas. It highlights how the inadequacies in provision in much of Latin America and Asia and most of Africa are much worse than most international statistics suggest. A such, they are key contributors to poverty and premature death. It also highlights how too little attention is given to sanitation. Many people still assume that clean water is the main issue, as can be seen in international conventions and declarations that forget to mention sanitation. It must be remembered that human excreta is extremely dangerous unless disposed of safely. Where provisions for water and sanitation are inadequate, the diseases that arise from faecally contaminated food, water and hands are among the world's leading causes of premature death and serious illness; such diseases also contribute much to under-nutrition, as diarrhoeal diseases and intestinal parasites rob people's bodies of nutrition. Good provision for sanitation should virtually eliminate these health burdens.

This chapter is also about definitions. Less than half of the urban population of Africa, Asia and Latin America has adequate provision for water and sanitation. Yet 85 per cent of the urban population in these same regions has ‘improved’ water and 84 per cent has ‘improved’ sanitation. Both of these statistics are correct; the statistical evidence for both is robust. Here, we explain how this is possible and the important differences between what is defined as ‘improved’ provision and what is considered ‘adequate’ or ‘safe’ provision. ‘Improved’ provision for water is often no more than a public tap shared by several hundred people with an intermittent supply of water. ‘Improved’ sanitation is often no more than a latrine, to which access is difficult, shared among many households.

This chapter also makes clear why it is so difficult to reach low-income groups in urban areas with good quality provision for water and sanitation. Most of the world's urban population lives in low- and middle- income nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. A significant proportion of these people have incomes that are so low that they can afford no more than US$0.01–US$0.05 a day on water and sanitation. If piped water is not available at this price, they will use any other available water source that is cheaper or free (for instance, drawing from polluted and faecally contaminated lakes, rivers or shallow wells). Tens of millions of urban dwellers defecate in the open or into plastic bags or waste paper (what is often termed ‘wrap and throw’) because they have no toilet they can use. Many such people live in such cramped conditions (5–6 persons in a small room) that there is no room in their homes for toilets. Many are tenants and their landlords make no provision for sanitation in the rooms they rent. This is the challenge facing governments and international agencies intent on improving provision.

Judging who has adequate provision

Official statistics on provision for water and sanitation suggest that it is only a minority of urban dwellers who are unserved, even in low- income nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For instance, even in Africa, by the year 2000, 85 per cent of the urban population had ‘improved’ provision for water and 84 per cent had ‘improved’ provision for sanitation. The total number of urban dwellers worldwide lacking improved provision by the year 2000 (173 million for water, 403 million for sanitation) is obviously a serious problem, but greatly reducing this should be relatively easy, given that urban centres concentrate people in ways that usually reduce unit costs for improving provision. Much of the urban population is willing and able to pay for improved provision. Problems seem much more serious in rural areas, where most of those lacking improved provision live. Indeed, if international commitments to halve the proportion of people lacking water and sanitation by 2015 are to be met, this would imply giving priority to rural areas.

But what if the hundreds of millions of urban dwellers who are said by government statistics or household surveys to have improved provision for water and sanitation still have very inadequate provision, which also means very large health burdens from water-related diseases? This chapter seeks to demonstrate that this is the case and to present the evidence for this. It is not claiming that the official statistics are wrong, but it is suggesting that most governments and international agencies misinterpret these statistics and, in so doing, give a false impression of the extent of provision for water and sanitation in urban areas. It also suggests that new benchmarks need to be set to monitor global trends on provision for water and sanitation in urban areas.

Everyone has access to water in some form since no one can live without water. The issue is not whether they have access to water but whether the water supplies are safe, sufficient for their needs, regular (for instance available 24 hours a day and throughout the year), convenient (for instance piped to their home or close by) and available at a price they can afford. Similarly, for sanitation, everyone has to make some provision for defecation, even if this is defecating on open land or into an open drain (as is the case for tens of millions of urban dwellers). The issue is not whether they have provision for sanitation but whether they have a quality of provision that is convenient for all household members (including women and children), affordable and eliminates their (and others’) contact with human excreta and other wastewater (which may also be contaminated with excreta) within the home and the wider neighbourhood. If households do not have toilets in the home, do they have access to toilets close by that are well maintained, affordable and accessible without queues? Are there toilets that children are happy to use? As Chapter 2 will describe, children are frightened to use many toilets. If the toilets are not connected to sewers, there is also the issue of what happens to the excreta (for instance, is it polluting ground-water or going into open drains?) and also the provision for the disposal of households’ waste-water. If they are connected to sewer systems, there is the issue of whether the outputs from these systems are polluting other people's waters.

Thus, any assessment of provision for water and sanitation (in cities, smaller urban centres or rural areas) has to begin with a definition of ‘adequate provision’ against which to compare actual provision. In high-income nations, the need for all urban households to have water piped to their home that is safe (ie drinkable) and regular (available 24 hours a day), internal plumbing (so piped water is available in bathrooms, kitchens and toilets) and their own sanitary toilet within the house or apartment (usually connected to sewers) is unquestioned. These expectations can be used as the standards. Virtually all urban dwellers in high-income nations live in houses, apartments or boarding houses that meet these standards. These standards may also be set and achievable in well-governed cities in middle-income nations, as demonstrated by cities such as Porto Alegre¹ and Seoul. ² These are good standards too from a public health viewpoint, as will be elaborated later in this chapter and in Chapter 2. They are also the standards preferred by households so long as they are not too expensive, because they eliminate a lot of hard work and drudgery fetching and carrying water and getting rid of human wastes and wastewater. But by these standards, most of the urban population in Africa and Asia and much of the urban population in Latin America and the Caribbean have inadequate provision both for water and for sanitation. Indeed, large sections of the urban population in these regions have levels of provision that are nowhere near this standard. Hundreds of millions of people only have unsafe and inconvenient water sources, compete with hundreds of others to get water from distant standpipes, have to share dirty, poorly maintained toilets with dozens of other people, or have no toilets at all within the home. This fact will surprise no one who works in cities and smaller urban centres in these regions but it does seem to contradict the official international statistics on provision for water and sanitation, which suggest that it is only a minority of urban dwellers that lack provision.

But there is a danger in setting the standards for adequate provision too high. In any city or smaller urban centre where large sections of the population have very inadequate provision (and low incomes), and where there are limited resources available for improving provision, setting too high a standard could work to the disadvantage of those with the worst provision. It could mean that all available resources go to providing a small proportion of the population with high standards – and of course, it will generally be the higher-income groups and those with greater political muscle who benefit from this. In such circumstances, it can be argued that the priority should be to ensure that everyone has improved provision, with higher standa...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Provision for Water and Sanitation in Cities
• 2 The Impacts of Deficient Provision
• 3 Explaining Deficiencies in Urban Water and Sanitation Provision
• 4 Increasing Water Stress and How it Relates to Urban Water and Sanitation Provision
• 5 Changing Perspectives and Roles in Urban Water and Sanitation Provision: Privatization and Beyond
• 6 Improving Urban Water and Sanitation Provision as part of Integrated Water Resource Management
• 7 Governance for Good Water and Sanitation Provision: Getting the Best Out of Public, Private and Community Organizations
• Index