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The welfare implications of safe water and sanitation cannot be overstated. The economic gains from provision of improved services to millions of unserved Africans in enormous. The international adoption of Millennium Development Goals brought the inadequacies of service provision sharply into focus. With only 58% and 31% enjoying access to water and sanitation services respectively, Sub-Saharan Africa is the only continent that is off-track in achieving the MDGs in 2015. The problem is compounded by the fact that a rigorous and credible baseline did not exist on coverage to improved water and sanitation and resources required to meet the MDGs. This book aims to contribute to this gap by collecting a wealth of primary and secondary information to present the most up-to-date and comprehensive quantitative snapshot of water and sanitation sectors. The book evaluates the challenges to the water and sanitation sectors within the urban and rural areas and deepen our understanding of drivers of coverage expansion in the context of financing, institutional reforms, and efficiency improvements. Finally, the book establishes the investment needs for water and sanitation with a target of meeting the MDGs and compares with the existing financing envelopes, disaggregated by proportions that can be recouped by efficiency gains and net financing gaps. The directions for the future draw on lessons learned from best practices and present the menu of choices available to African countries. There is no recipe book that neatly lays out the possible steps the country should adopt to enhance coverage and quality of service. The challenges differ to a significant extent among African countries and solutions must be tailored to individual national or regional conditions.

In the recent past, there has been a substantial push to increase the sanitation infrastructure in India to end open defecation and improve level of hygiene. The choice of the type of sanitation, however, depends on demographic, socio-economic, tenurial, cultural and sanitation surroundings, which not only impacts sanitation practices but also incidences of diseases. This paper empirically analyses the determinants of households' choice of toilet facility and the relation between incidence of diseases and sanitation using National Sample Survey Office's 76th round of the survey for 2018-19. The results indicate that the social, economic and cultural factors have significant impact on the households' choices of a toilet. There is a preference for flush type toilets connected to a sewer among households with better socio-economic status. This research finds that the quality of microenvironment within which a household lives has a significant impact on the incidence of disease. The results imply that the interventions for improved sanitation need to be holistic, emphasising microenvironment improvement and providing better access to sanitation infrastructure and inculcating more hygienic behavioural practices.

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from over eight hundred town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels of infrastructure investment between 1887 and 1903. Instrumental variable regressions show that falling interest rates after 1887 stimulated investment and led to lower infant mortality. These findings suggest that Parliament could have expedited mortality decline by subsidizing loans or facilitating private borrowing.

Includes bibliographical references. ; Due to historical and current national and international politico-economic activities, present day south-east Madagascar is characterised by poverty, inequality and underdevelopment. As a result water supply and sanitation provision, as one of the cornerstones of primary and preventative healthcare, has been neglected. A year of participant observation in the rural south-east provided a foundation for developing a strategy to assess the current geography of defecation and sanitation infrastructure, prevailing patterns of latrine use, alternative sources of faecal-oral disease and residents perceptions regarding improved sanitation in the port town of Fort Dauphin.

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town Councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from more than 800 town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels of infrastructure investment between 1887 and 1903. Instrumental variable regressions show that falling interest rates after 1887 stimulated investment and led to lower infant mortality. These findings suggest that Parliament could have expedited mortality decline by subsidizing loans or facilitating private borrowing.

Many rural communities lack economies of scale for sanitation infrastructure management and do not receive support from state and federal governments. These problems are particularly severe for Native American Nations, certain rural areas, as well as many developing countries. Geographical information systems (GIS) can improve the management of water and wastewater infrastructure in such areas by using technology to offset the issues of low density, scattered settlements, and large acreages. However, integrating GIS technology into such communities presents technical and organizational challenges. The Tucson office of the Indian Health Services faced such challenges when developing a sanitation GIS for the Tohono O'odham Nation in Southwestern Arizona. The GIS developers found that with adequate management support and communication with potential users, the technical challenges can be met. However, the organizational challenges associated with data sharing and confidentiality slowed the integration of the GIS and may limit the sustainability of the system.

This article explores how multiple health risks in municipalities with Roma settlements in Slovakia are related to the varieties of local governance and the authorities' conduct towards the local Roma population. The first part of the paper describes the situation in Roma settlements from the perspective of unequal access to sewerage and water pipelines. Introduced here are data on identified contagious diseases that correlated multiple health risks with the lack of sanitation and/or water infrastructure. The second section of the paper put forth typologies of government approaches towards the Roma, which based on ethnographic fieldwork, allows us to identify factors of attitudinal, structural and policy-oriented nature. Research results point to a "triad" of key circumstances: these are the structural conditions in municipalities and the history of local inter-ethnic relations and attitude of authorities towards Roma. Finally, possible solutions and approaches regarding how to mitigate the multiple health risks are discussed. It is suggested that on the one hand, in many villages there is a profound institutional discrimination of Roma with respect to water and sanitation infrastructure; on the other hand, water services are increasingly becoming an expensive commodity that not everyone can afford. The article concludes with discussion on enabling conditions and ways to ensure access to basic infrastructure in rural Roma communities. The solution is not only a compliance with principles of non-discrimination and existing technical norms and standards but also in securing the accessible funding for construction of the sanitation infrastructure in a smart way, including innovations and operation of cheaper and environmentally responsible sanitation technologies.

Focusing specifically on sanitation services in Los Angeles (LA) City, I examine (1) how various stakeholders socially construct and mobilise around breakdowns in public infrastructure and (2) how technology is used, both practically and politically, to address breakdowns. Through an archival analysis of six years of LA City Council documents and proceedings, supplemented by interviews with four key informants, I demonstrate how, in 2014 Los Angeles, media and political actors constructed a perceived crisis in trash services. In responding to claims of inadequate and biassed services, City sanitation officials blamed technological glitches and deceptive data. To address the crisis, the sanitation department developed a database to track neighbourhood cleanliness and strategically deploy sanitation workers to the areas most in need. Despite local politicians' and sanitation officials' presentation of technological innovation as a panacea, the database had little effect and was deactivated after three years. The failure of the database is attributed to two dynamics: first, inverted development wherein LASAN prematurely developed and deployed digital technology before a strong analogue foundation had been established to make the technology functional and efficient; and second, LASAN utilised the cleanliness indexing database as a form of mediatised stopgap technology. Although the database ultimately proved to be of little practical use, LASAN's public relations strategy around the database effectively intervened in a political crisis and reinforced the agency's power.

The suitability and feasibility of public-private partnership (PPP) patterns in a rural context have not been well-documented and understood. To address this research gap and practical plight, this study aims to analyze the rural resident's willingness to pay for and participate in the improvement of rural sanitation facilities, and further explore the drivers and barriers affecting their decisions. This study was performed in rural areas of three western provinces, including Shaanxi, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia, of western China's rural areas by conducting a survey on 1,248 rural residents. In Inner Mongolia, the proportion of respondents who were willing to pay was highest, while the proportion of respondents who may provide labor was lowest among the three provinces. Respondents from Ningxia had the least willing to pay, and respondents from Shaanxi had the highest willingness to participate. Overall, respondents' rural (living) duration time, personal interest in local government notice, and the latest time when the sanitation facilities were improved could significantly affect their willingness. In Inner Mongolia, occupation and water availability could significantly influence respondents' willingness, and both gender and health conditions had significant impacts. In Ningxia, respondents' personal interest in local government notice had a notable impact on willingness, and low-income respondents showed a more notable willingness to pay and participate. In Shaanxi, occupation and water availability could significantly influence respondents' willingness. Respondents' personal interest in local government notice had a notable impact on their willingness. This study is of significant importance to understand rural resident's participation in sanitation infrastructure improvement to support relevant PPP projects, and is important to solve poverty-caused dilemmas.

This is a conference paper. ; The paper looks at how urban sanitation, infrastructure and mapping was used as a vehicle for Intermediate Land Titling (ILT) and increasing tenure security. The pilot project was implemented during a period in which land tenure and eviction had become, and continues to be, a major issue in Cambodia. Especially vulnerable have been informal urban poor settlements which have largely been excluded from Government and donor titling programmes such as the World Bank's Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP). This study examines how instead of looking at titling or upgrading in isolation, it is the combination of the two aspects, together with endorsement from local authorities, that helps reinforce the other and create a more successful outcome – and possibly a template for future tenure projects in informal settlements.

Many city governments and actors have tested approaches or models and technological developments to address urban service crises. But this has tended to be without much success, as the service delivery gap keeps widening, leading to governance failure. One response to this decline in governance capacity has been the evolution of co-production arrangements. The overarching aim of this thesis was to examine the co-production arrangements of urban sanitation infrastructure provision among multiple actors in informal settlements, and to interrogate whether the predominance of such arrangements was indicative of an alternative form of city governance. Two wards within Arusha city (Tanzania) were selected as case studies. A range of research methods was employed to uncover the landscape of actors involved, and to explore co-productive processes, socio-cultural aspects and other complexities shaping sanitation provision in the two selected informal settlements. Case study methodology was used with a range of data collection methods (household surveys, focus group discussions, document review and semi-structured interviews). The study adopted a relational approach informed by ActorNetwork Theory as the analytical framework for understanding the human-material interactions in the sanitation chain. Key findings indicate that co-production serves a public function, but it is not recognised as such in Tanzanian public policy. Individual and collective co-production arrangements have been established that bring together various state and non-state actors in the sanitation chain to form networks. These networks make service delivery possible, which one actor alone could not deliver. The study reveals that sanitation infrastructure in informal settlements is largely provided by the household, although some are either inactive or captured co-procuders. Further, the narratives indicate that complexities and the contextual factors (including gender-based power dynamics, social norms, values, traditions and culture) shape access to sanitation facilities in the city of Arusha. The study found that the exclusion of women and children from sharing toilet facilities motivated Maasai men to practice defection in open areas. Further, this study speculates on an alternative form of governing city affairs based on actor-networks in the co-production process: co-productive networked governance. Future research is needed to examine how co-productive networked governance could be integrated into the existing city governance structures and how informal governance arrangement could be recognised and enhanced.

Objectives: We conduct a revaluation of the Thornhill and Fincher research project on parasites using finely- resolved geographic data on parasite prevalence, individual-level sociocultural data, and multilevel Bayesian modeling. In contrast to the evolutionary psychological mechanisms linking parasites to human behavior and cultural character- istics proposed by Thornhill and Fincher, we offer an alternative hypothesis that structural racism and differential access to sanitation systems drive both variation in parasite prevalence and differential behaviors and cultural characteristics. Methods: We adopt a Bayesian framework to estimate parasite prevalence rates in 51 districts in eight Latin Ameri- can countries using the disease status of 170,220 individuals tested for infection with the intestinal roundworm Ascaris lumbricoides (Hu€rlimann et al., [2011]: PLoS Negl Trop Dis 5:e1404). We then use district-level estimates of parasite prevalence and individual-level social data from 5,558 individuals in the same 51 districts (Latinobar􏰀ometro, 2008) to assess claims of causal associations between parasite prevalence and sociocultural characteristics. Results: We find, contrary to Thornhill and Fincher, that parasite prevalence is positively associated with preferen- ces for democracy, negatively associated with preferences for collectivism, and not associated with violent crime rates or gender inequality. A positive association between parasite prevalence and religiosity, as in Fincher and Thornhill (2012: Behav Brain Sci 35:61–79), and a negative association between parasite prevalence and achieved education, as predicted by Eppig et al. (2010: Proc R S B: Biol Sci 277:3801–3808), become negative and unreliable when reasonable controls are included in the model. We find support for all predictions derived from our hypothesis linking structural racism to both parasite prevalence and cultural outcomes. Conclusions: We conclude that best practices in biocultural modeling require examining more than one hypothesis, retaining individual-level data and its associated variance whenever possible, and adopting multilevel techniques suited to the structuring of the data.