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Sanitation Partnerships
Thinking about rental accommodation
Many advocate a demand-responsive approach to improving local sanitation – strengthening householders’ own desire to invest in sanitation facilities. This desire is clearly very dependent upon the context the householder is faced with, the means at their disposal and the importance they attach to convenience, privacy, dignity and health. Yet in poor urban communities many rent, and land tenure is often lacking. The incentives for either tenants, or owners without land tenure, to invest time and money in fixed infrastructure is generally weak. This poses a direct challenge to demand responsive approaches, which often skirt the problem by dealing with only a small percentage of households in any given community (early adopters). Yet for health gains to be made and for impact at scale the majority within a given neighbourhood must ‘adopt’. Sanitation promoters may therefore have to consider blending their approaches with the lower rungs on the sanitation ladder, or find innovative ways to engage these “difficult groups”.
See Sanitation Partnerships: Landlord or tenant? The importance of rental relationships to poor community sanitation in 3 African countries
BPD convened a roundtable to explore this issue further and debate what it meant for those interested in sanitation partnerships. The discussions can be reviewed in, Sanitation Partnerships: A roundtable - The relevance of tenancy to sanitation in poor communities. This built on a cursory review of the tenancy situation in Maputo, Maseru and Nairobi, which looked at the importance of rental relationships to sanitation in poor communities.
Case study example:
Maseru in Lesotho was known for the success of the Urban Sanitation Improvement Team (USIT) programme dating back to the 1980s, which rested on a strong partnership across government, donor agencies, service providers and others. USIT worked with local builders to develop standard Ventilation Improved Pit Latrine (VIP) designs and construction norms, and conducted highly successful sanitation promotion campaigns to build demand, supported by a loan scheme to assist households to fund their own latrines. By 1995, over 12,000 households in Maseru had installed VIP toilets with USIT support. A formal programme linked the different parties together and governed how public finances were spent and results assessed.
However, the population of Maseru has virtually doubled to over 300 000 since the mid-1980s. Growth continues at about 7% a year with the majority of new residents comprising poor people fleeing drought in rural areas, and migrant mine workers no longer able to find work in South Africa. The biggest sanitation gap is no longer among owner-occupiers, but tenants living in ‘line houses’, or malaene – rows of rented one-roomed dwellings where it is common for five or more families to share a single pit toilet. As transient tenants, these households have little incentive to invest in improvements and major maintenance themselves. New approaches will be needed if this new gap is to be tackled effectively. |
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