Community-based approaches for addressing the urban sanitation challenge

Journal article, 2010

Urban sanitation presents one of the most significant service delivery challenges related to poverty alleviation and sustainable development in the developing world. The past decade has witnessed innovations in service delivery approaches for un-served rural and urban settlements with a clear policy shift to community-based approaches which attempt to overcome the supply-led, over-engineered sanitation solutions of the past decades. This paper presents two examples of new developments: the urban-focused Household-centred Environmental Sanitation (HCES) and the rural-focused Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approaches. The internationally renowned CLTS approach has achieved considerable success since its introduction, by harnessing community and small private sector capacity to solve sanitation problems locally. Experience with validation of the HCES approach in a variety of urban sites in Africa, Asia and Latin America is presented in the second part of the paper- highlighting some of the lessons learned. The paper closes by arguing that a combination of HCES and CLTS, two field-tested methodologies, has the potential to improve the sustainability of sanitation service interventions.