Household-centred environmental sanitation

The large number of people around the world who still do not have access to adequate water, sanitation, drainage and solid waste disposal services provides sufficient evidence that conventional approaches to environmental sanitation are unable to make significant impact on the existing service backlog. In this article a radical change of thinking in household-centred environmental sanitation is explained and elaborated. Decisions regarding environmental sanitation interventions, especially those requiring sophisticated technology, are often taken at a political or administrative level, without involving the people to be served. This frequently results in the refusal of the supposed users of the services to accept operational or financial responsibility, thereby jeopardising the sustainability of the service. To promote user ownership of services, decisions should be taken at a level as close as possible to the source of the problem, in consultation with the people most directly affected.
Efficient, sustainable and cost-effective ways of providing service are identified, that have the capacity to balance improvements in the quality of people's lives with support for the well-being of the environment. Many of the tools which can contribute to the solutions exist already, and have been implemented individually. The efforts of the working group were not directed towards inventing new technologies or methods, but to using what is available, and by developing a holistic approach to make services more effective. This allows utilisation of methods, technologies and approaches already tested in practice, but in ways that offer the promise to make them more effective.