Giving Compass' Take:

• Market-based approaches are helping to achieve sanitation throughout Sub-Sahara Africa, but there are still barriers to scaling impact. 

• How can funders play a role in helping scale effective solutions for increasing access to sanitation? 

•  Check out these WASH tools for donors to learn more about WASH financing. 

We have just under 10 years until the 2030 deadline for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). And unfortunately, sanitation is one of the worst-performing sectors.

Currently, only about 30% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) population has basic or safely managed sanitation coverage. There are some stark statistics:

  • 20% of people in SSA still defecate in the open,
  • 31% have unimproved sanitation such as a toilet with an open pit
  • 18% have limited access to basic sanitation, such as sharing a latrine with other families or using a public toilet

Increases in sanitation coverage are not keeping pace with population growth in many countries; the number of people with unimproved sanitation continues to increase despite efforts to decrease it. From 2015 to 2017, there was an increase of 20 million people in SSA who did not have access to improved sanitation—from 300 million people to 320 million. In 2019, the WHO reported that there were still over 204 million open defecators and 184 million people with limited sanitation. The World Bank reports that at the current rate of progress, it will take more than one hundred years to reach universal coverage of basic sanitation.

So, what’s wrong and why are we achieving lackluster progress for basic sanitation in rural SSA?

One reason for this abysmal state of affairs is that current efforts toward increasing basic sanitation access are not designed for scale from the outset. Current approaches, and the activity-based grants that fund them, have been unable to harness economies of scale or sustained financing – and have therefore fizzled out after grant funding ends. The approaches that have been tested with the current funding paradigm include widespread subsidy, community-led total sanitation (CLTS) and market-based sanitation.

Read the full article about sanitation by John Sauer at PSI.