Understanding the Urban Poor’s Vulnerabilities in Sanitation and Water Supply

Many millions of urban dwellers are excluded from formal systems of water and sanitation service delivery. Without access to piped water and acceptable sanitation services, households and individuals are forced to use limited supplies of water, often of poor quality, from unreliable sources and usually at a high cost. Safe sanitation and the means to practice hygienic behaviours are often entirely absent. This paper argues that one of the root causes of this exclusion has been the long-standing inability of utility and city managers and their advisers to plan and implement water and sanitation systems which respond to the reality of the lives of the urban poor. Rigid approaches, based on inappropriate norms and standards, leave little room for regulated vending, licensed onselling, small scale network operation, and communitymanaged systems which could extend utilities’ reach into previously unserved urban spaces. Such an extension could enable utilities and cities to ‘recapture’ the systems of delivery which are now largely unregulated, often illegal and almost always substandard. The physical location, lack of voice, and day-to-day reality of many poor urban people form their greatest vulnerability in accessing services which are currently often captured by an urban elite. Executive Summary Many millions of urban dwellers are excluded from formal systems of water and sanitation service delivery. Without access to piped water and acceptable sanitation services, households and individuals are forced to use limited supplies of water, often of poor quality, from unreliable sources and usually at a high cost. Safe sanitation and the means to practice hygienic behaviours are often entirely absent. This paper argues that one of the root causes of this exclusion has been the long-standing inability of utility and city managers and their advisers to plan and implement water and sanitation systems which respond to the reality of the lives of the urban poor. Wholesale and Retail Services The delivery of essentially ‘networked’ services such as water and sanitation depends both on the delivery of trunk or wholesale services (bulk water, water treatment services, secondary distribution pipes, secondary collection and/or transportation systems, wastewater or sludge treatment services and disposal options) and retail services (taps and toilets) (Figure S1). This is the fundamental nub of the challenge in water and sanitation service delivery to the urban poor; solutions which address what we might term the wholesale end of the business and pay no attention to retail issues (wastewater treatment plants for example) are as unlikely to result in sustained citywide improvements as those which address retail issues alone. The 2006 Human Development Report notes for example the need for both ‘action from below’ and ‘government leadership’ (UNDP 2006). Identifying the Excluded Population In general those excluded from accessing formal services are the households or individuals located in areas of the city that are characterized by poor or absent planning, density, poor quality housing, lack of or ambiguous tenure and low access to basic urban services. Most households and individuals in this group are income poor. However, while some are slum dwellers or live in peripheral growth areas (often termed periurban), many live in pockets of poverty within better-off districts. Further, generalized terms such as ‘slum dweller’ themselves mask a wide range of urban realities. The challenge of defining such populations plays out in the lack of reliable aggregate data on their access to services. This unreliability is exacerbated because international benchmarks for access tend to ignore the reality of accessing basic services which they face.