The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council has recently published Hygiene and Sanitation Software: An Overview of Approaches by Andy Peal, Barbara Evans (who works with me in Leeds) and Carolien van der Voorden. A truly excellent publication! Here’s what it says it’s all about:
This document describes the various hygiene and sanitation ‘software’ approaches that have been deployed over the last 40 years by NGOs, development agencies, national and local governments in all types of settings – urban, informal-urban and rural.
There are many different software approaches and there is often confusion over, for example, what a particular approach is designed to achieve, what it comprises, when and where it should be used, how it should be implemented or how much it costs. There is currently no reference material that explains the different approaches available or helps practitioners
decide which one would be best to use for a particular situation. Moreover, the many ‘acronyms’ and ‘brand names’ in use frequently mean different things to different people.
Therefore, the purposes of this document are to clarify some of the confusion in the sector about the terminology and language used and provide a ‘ready reference’ or introduction to some of the more commonly used approaches. It is intended to be used as a resource tool both by a newcomer to the subject and by the more experienced practitioner who wishes to gain knowledge of other approaches with which he or she is not familiar.
Last year WSSCC published Public Funding for Sanitation: The Many Faces of Sanitation Subsidies by the same authors. Another crackingly good report!
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.