An impact-based method for the capacity planning of sanitation services in lower income countries

Population and economic growth in urban areas will increase the demand for the basic municipal sanitation services of drinking water supply, wastewater and sewage service, and solid waste management. Deficiencies in the quantity, quality, and access to these services are chronic to acute in cities of lower- and middle-income countries. Standard approaches in planning for these services involve treating each service as an independent entity, focusing exclusively on the physical infrastructure immediately relevant to the deficiency, and limiting the dedicated capital improvement plan to a time period that is exogenous to the initial endowment of the local service area. These shortcomings in the standard approaches have resulted in municipal sanitation systems (MSS) that are unable to sustain the capacity to meet an ever-increasing demand that is diversified by type of user, spatial distribution of use, and rate of increase of usage type by geographical area. This unsustainability leads to increasing deficits in the supply of municipal sanitation services in low- and middle-income countries. These deficits result in catastrophic human health, economic, and environmental effects.; The goal of this research is to develop a method for planning municipal sanitation systems that assures the sustainable capacity for safe, reliable, and affordable services to communities where these services are deficient or at risk of becoming so. This goal is realized by three objectives: (1) To identify and classify the interdependencies between the services of drinking water supply, wastewater and sewage service, and municipal solid waste management; (2) To evaluate options for mitigating the impacts in the context of the requirements that affect service capacity; (3) To develop an integrated planning model for the investment of resources in municipal sanitation systems which ensures that the sequence of short-term decisions remains compatible with the long-term goal of sustainable capacity assurance.; The objectives are achieved by adapting the pedagogy of risk analysis to the application of capacity building for municipal sanitation services in lower income countries (LIC). Thus risk assessment techniques are modified to perform impact assessment of the services. Risk evaluation (a component of risk management), is modified to perform impact evaluation. Finally, risk management is modified to perform impact management in the form of strategic planning that balances short-term investment decisions with the goal of long-term capacity assurance.