City Sanitation Plans (CSP)

City Sanitation (Master) Plans (CSP), sometimes also referred to as Municipal Sanitation Plans or Water and Sanitation Strategy Plans, are strategic planning processes for citywide sanitation sector development. To manage water resources, water safety plans (WSP) exist.

A citywide sanitation strategy includes the vision, missions, and goals of sanitation development as well as strategies to meet these goals. Each strategy is then translated into indicative programmes (and projects). The citywide sanitation strategy covers (WSP 2010):

• Technical aspects, including strategies and programmes for the development of (a) domestic wastewater services, (b) solid waste management services, and (c) micro drainage services.
• Non-technical aspects, including strategies for the development of non-physical aspects such as (a) community awareness and participation, (b) policy and regulation, (c) institutional capacity, (d) private sector engagement, (e) NGO engagement, (f) financing and tariffs, and (g) monitoring and evaluation.

Frameworks for the development of CSPs have been published, amongst others, by TAYLER et al. (2000), ROSENSWEIG et al. (2002), MOUD (2008), and WSP (2010).

(Adapted from WSP 2010)

Although each city is different, city sanitation services should be developed based on a common set of principles. Services must be comprehensive and continuously accessible to all residents. The entire city should have sanitation services suited to its needs, allowing all residents to enjoy the benefits of improved sanitation.

To meet the total sanitation principles, a city needs a strategic approach. Following are some generic approaches that a city can use as the basis for developing more strategic approaches to sanitation development:

• Enhance synergy among the actors in sanitation development, including municipal government agencies, the private sector, NGOs, and others.
• Employ appropriate technologies that are suitable to user needs, while ensuring that they are relevant to the city’s actual conditions, comply with technical standards, and prevent potential impacts (see also sanitation systems).
• Develop sanitation in all parts of the city (citywide), prioritising poor residential areas where the health risks are highest.
• Promote awareness of health and hygiene behaviour while creating demand for better sanitation services.
• Create opportunities and incentives for private sector initiatives in the development and operation of sanitation services (see also public private partnerships).
• Foster better use of existing sanitation services, which becomes the basis for developing new services.
• Encourage the development of community-based sanitation services, especially in areas where public and private services are difficult to establish.
• Engage stakeholder groups, including women groups, in sanitation planning, in line with their respective capacities (see also water sanitation and gender).
• Create enabling institutional and regulatory frameworks to accelerate sanitation services development.
• Increase funding from sources other than municipal government, such as from the national and provincial governments, donor agencies, the private sector and the public (see also financing and sources of funding).
• Adopt step-wise sanitation development as available resources allow.

(Adapted from TAYLER et al. 2000)

Responsibility for delivering sanitation services at the municipal level is usually assigned to the municipal authorities and they must therefore be at the centre of any strategic sanitation planning process. However, the power to set budgets and to determine policy, spending priorities and institutional arrangements often lies with the state or national government. Municipalities therefore have limited freedom to run their affairs in the way they think best. Nevertheless, steps taken locally can make a real difference to the quality of sanitation services. Those operating at the municipal level face some constraints, but existing laws and procedures often provide sufficient flexibility to enable committed individuals to go at least some way to overcoming these constraints.

(Adapted from TAYLER et al. 2000)

It is important that planning activities follow a logical sequence.

Stage 1 – Preparing to Plan

It will only be possible to develop a plan if there is general agreement on the need to plan. Therefore, in a first step, various groups with an interest in sanitation must be talked to, where necessary convinced of the benefits that they will gain from participating in and drawn into the planning process (see also stakeholder analysis starting by the stakeholder identification factsheet).

Where there are no national and/or state/provincial government legislation and procedures requiring a CSP to be produced, planning has to be sold to other stakeholders on its own merits. This can be done by:

• Encouraging them to join in gathering and analysing information about current problems and their causes.
• Arranging for representatives of local organisations to meet their counterparts in a town in which a successful planning exercise has already been carried out.
• Gaining support for planning from senior local administrators and politicians.

Stage 2 – Understand Current Problems

The starting point for developing better sanitation services will normally be analysis of current problems and their causes. Physical problems often result from deeper problems relating to limited institutional capacity and/or people’s sanitation-related behaviour. There’s a need to understand these underlying problems if the causes of problems are to be treated and not just their symptoms (to help you understand local problems, see the understand your system section).

The following basic questions can help to explore and understand the current sanitation problems:

• Who is responsible for existing services?
• What sanitation problems do we face?
• What are the causes of those problems?
• What resources are available to solve them?

Service users consultation should become part of the routine of municipal service delivery and be done during the investigation of the existing situation in light of:

• Users know about their neighbourhood, the way municipal services operate there, and the sort of improvements that might work (‘demand-side’ knowledge). This complements the ‘supply-side’ knowledge of the municipality and so helps to give a fuller understanding of the situation.
• The service provider can only find out about the services that people want and are willing to pay for by talking to them. This can help prevent money being wasted on services that people will not use.
• Users have responsibilities for the proper use and maintenance of sanitation infrastructure, but there is a need to talk to them to agree and clarify these responsibilities.

Stage 3 – Developing Solutions

The main steps required to develop solutions to sanitation problems are shown diagrammatically below.

It also shows the need to:

1. Develop an improved information base, including improved maps and records where appropriate;
2. Review specific services and programmes in order to obtain more detailed information on specific problems identified in the course of the previous stage; and
3. Pilot projects to test ideas, approaches and technologies before they are introduced on a citywide scale. Because of their relatively small scale, pilot projects can be prepared and implemented fairly quickly.

• The planning workshop: The planning workshop is a key point in the process. It provides the opportunity to 1) involve all stakeholders in problem analysis, 2) establish a structure for coordinated planning, and 3) agree priorities and assign short-term tasks.
• Immediate improvements: The planning workshop is likely to identify some improvements that are obvious and affordable and can be implemented immediately, provided that there is commitment from the parties involved.
• Developing a good information base: Good base maps are necessary for a number of reasons, in particular for drainage planning, mapping existing facilities and for showing the status of various areas. If initial investigation has revealed that some essential information is not available in a useable form, that information has to be produced.
• Detailed reviews of specific services: Though some improvements can be made immediately, in most cases a full review of specific services will be needed before lasting improvements can be made.
•  Assessing options through piloting: New ideas and approaches should not be introduced citywide until they have been tested to see if they will work, are affordable and can be managed by the staff that are available.
• Linking into existing schemes: Linking the various components of the CSP with existing schemes will help to ensure that resources are available to implement the plan.

For more information, see also the exploring and decision making section.

Stage 4 – Develop Citywide Municipal Plan

A CSP should include an overall goal, a statement of the rules, policies and principles underlying the plan and details of the current position, objectives, activities, responsibilities and resource requirements for each plan component.

It is important for the plan to:

• Set priorities for action and investment, and explain clearly how these priorities have been established, and
• Have realistic ambitions, in other words the targets it sets must really be achievable within the specified time frame. Achievement of the first year’s objectives will build confidence amongst everyone involved. Conversely, if targets are set too high and not achieved, however, people will lose confidence in the plan and may ignore it.

It is important that both municipal and state authorities formally endorse the plan so that from now on, all concerned departments and agencies work within the framework it has established.

Stage 5 – Implementing the Plan

In one sense, implementation is the end of the plan process. However, this should not be seen as an end, but rather as a beginning. There’ll be a lot of learning from the process of implementation and it will be important that the lessons learned are fed back into future initiatives. See also project implementation for more info. After the plan has been implemented, it is important to monitor and evaluate whether it is having the desired effect and whether it has been implemented properly. Links between planning and implementation. Note the importance that it gives to monitoring and evaluation of plan outcomes and the use of that information to review progress with the plan and evaluate its effect from time to time (TAYLER et al. 2000).

After the plan has been implemented, it is important to monitor and evaluate whether it is having the desired effect and whether it has been implemented properly.