Assessing sanitary mixtures in East African cities

Many intervention measures have been sought in the past to address sanitation challenges, but largely the approaches have been characterised by a clash between centralised and a decentralised approach. Sustainability assessment has also been characterized by a dualistic approach, between the techno-centric and the eco-centric. The dualistic dichotomy in sanitary provision is often reduced to competition between the proponents, none of them providing a panacea for solving complex sanitary challenges. Such opposing views are often simplistic and not in tandem with the existing multiple sanitary options and service providers in East African cities, which defy such classification. This thesis, based on case studies of a primary and secondary city (Kampala, Uganda and Kisumu, Kenya, resp.) therefore, provides the theoretical and empirical basis for a third way of classifying and assessing the multiple technical and institutional options to sanitary provision. This novel assessment approach called ‘modernised mixtures’ is used in this thesis as a tool for conceptualising, assessing and improving sanitary provision in East African cities. The approach is an inclusive way of assessing sanitary mixtures, which benefits decision making among imperfect options. [Taken from Preface].