In 2006 for the first time more than half of the world’s population will be urban. African cities in particular are growing at an impressive rate. Many of this new urban population will reside in mushrooming informal settlements, where the chances of connecting them to sewerage networks are slim. “On-site sanitation” is thus their only recourse, which for many poor households means some variety of pit latrine.
Calls for partnerships to help those without proper access to sanitation are growing. But while we increasingly understand the circumstances in which partnerships to provide urban solid waste collection or drinking water can flourish, much less is known about how to foster large-scale partnerships for sanitation.
BPD recently set out to work with ‘sanitation partnerships’ in five African cities - Dar es Salaam, Durban, Maputo, Maseru and Nairobi. The aim was to see whether partnerships can indeed make a difference to on-site sanitation. The first challenge was in actually finding examples of on-site sanitation being addressed at scale, or of diverse organisations finding ways to work productively together.
Despite the considerable rhetoric around the need for partnerships, were they considered ineffectual by practitioners, or to difficult to establish in practice? By looking at the five projects through a ‘partnership lens’ BPD identified three particular considerations that challenge both on-site sanitation programmes and partnership approaches.
It does however appear that there are three broad roles for sanitation partnerships can play – these bring stakeholders together in different ways and each focus on a different piece of the puzzle.
The findings of the work are now available in a ‘hub and spoke’ format.