• Editors' Summary
• Credits

1. An Urban Future
2. The Urban Poor
3. Pollution and Health
4. Impact on the Environment
5. Making Urban Areas Work
• Improving Urban Goverance
• Improving the Lives of the Urban Poor
• Improving Water Supplies and Sanitation
• Curbing Air Pollution
• Recycling Wastes
• A Way Forward

• Figures
• Tables
• Side-bars
• Bibliography

• Developing countries face fastest urban growth
• Why urban areas are growing
• The poor have greatest health risks
• Heavy ecological footprints
• Improving urban governance
• Assuring water and sanitation
• Mumbai cleans up

• POPLINE
• Media/Materials Clearinghouse
• Other issues
• To order copies
• CCP Home Page

Published by the Population Information Program, Center for Communication Programs, The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, 111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, Maryland 21202, USA

With community participation, municipal governments can improve water supplies and sanitation. In the past 25 years, for example, Indonesia’s Kampung Improvement Program has upgraded 11,000 hectares (27,000 acres) of slums and improved living conditions for 15 million people, providing sanitation, potable water, and garbage removal (136). Based on a strong partnership between urban communities and local governments, the program installed drains and sewers, laid thousands of meters of water pipes, built public bathing, washing, and toilet facilities, and provided receptacles and garbage carts for solid waste disposal (64).

Providing an adequate water supply and improving public sanitation are the two steps most needed to prevent the majority of water-related diseases and deaths in urban areas. For better sanitation, constructing sanitary latrines, building sewers, and treating waste water to biodegrade human wastes will help curb diseases (145). Such simple technologies as hand-pumps and improved latrines have benefited millions of people across the world (150).

Supplying water by managing demand. From both economic and environmental standpoints, saving water is more effective than trying to find or develop new sources of water. Managing the demand for water contributes to more efficient and equitable provision of clean water supplies (149).

Municipal governments often can improve water availability quickly by fixing leaky valves and water mains and cutting back on illegal taps, since up to 70% of the water pumped into cities in the developing world is lost before it can reach the intended consumers (136, 148, 149). Leakage is often a sizeable source of water loss. It results from either lack of maintenance or failure to update old systems. In urban distribution systems a major source of illegal connections may be contractors supplying new housing developments (135).

Sara A. Holtz, Peace Corps Volunteer

In Burkina Faso boys transport water to customers who lack access to piped water. Pricing water to reflect its scarcity is complex but can be crucial to meeting the demand.

Pricing water to reflect its value as a scarce resource is crucial to saving water. Pricing water minimally or not at all encourages wasteful use. Cities often provide water at inordinately low prices to those who are connected to the water supply system—usually middle- and upper-class residential neighborhoods and central business areas. Water use fees may not even cover costs, let alone generate any revenue to pay for extending service to poorer neighborhoods (97).

Since access to water supply depends on income and location, conserving water by managing its price is complex. For example, for high-income and middle-income groups, the most effective water pricing measures include increasing rates and raising awareness about the importance of water conservation (149).

Measures to increase access to water often make water more expensive for the poor, who may not be able to afford water tariffs (149). Tariff structures designed to conserve water must penalize overuse but not restrict access for the urban poor. With tariffs in place, high-volume consumers, to some extent, can help to subsidize water for the poor (135).

Charging for municipal water connections does not necessarily deny water to low-income communities. In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, for example, six neighborhoods joined together and approached the city water authority with a request to provide piped water. Consumers themselves paid for the water connections. Nevertheless, the price that households paid for water dropped because residents no longer had to buy expensive water from street vendors. The quality of their water improved (97).

Often, potable water is used where lower-quality water would be acceptable. For example, potable water is sometimes used to flush toilets, wash vehicles, and clean streets. Instead, treated wastewater or urban runoff can be reused efficiently for some of these purposes and for irrigating crops (135).

Improving sanitation. More widespread use of two types of sanitation technologies—on-site and off-site—can help improve sanitation. On-site technologies dispose of wastes where they are created, as with latrines. Off-site technologies dispose of waste centrally, as in conventional sewerage treatment systems (50).

Better on-site sanitation can be achieved through greater use of dry nonflush latrines, which can be built cheaply, are easy to operate, and are inexpensive to maintain. In particular, they are suited to areas where water supply is limited and there is enough land to dig new latrines and fill up old ones (50).

Off-site technologies tend to have a much higher cost, require skilled labor for construction, and they need constant maintenance. Conventional sewers also require substantial water supplies (50, 113). With planning, they can be implemented at low cost in urban areas, however, as in the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi, Pakistan.

The Orangi Pilot Project, an organization established in 1980, is one of the world’s best known community efforts to provide affordable sanitation and wastewater management. The local government was unable to deliver an adequate sanitation system to Orangi, Karachi’s biggest slum settlement. The Orangi Pilot Project proposed the installation of a self-financed and self-managed sewerage system. The project found a way to lower the cost of latrines and sewerage lines so that the poor could afford them (5). The project organized meetings for neighborhood residents to explain the benefits of improving sanitation (5, 44).

Once residents reached an agreement to improve sanitation, they elected a leader, who applied to the project for technical help. In response, project staff surveyed the neighborhood, made plans, and estimated costs of improving sanitation. The leaders informed the residents and collected money from them. Once the sewer system was installed, each neighborhood was responsible for maintenance (44).

To date the Orangi project has covered almost 84% of the settlement. Collectively, residents have raised about US$1.7 million to self-finance the construction of their sanitation system. More than 72,000 sanitary latrines have been installed, and 1.3 million feet of sewer lines have been laid (5).