While universal access to toilets has received considerable impetus, the much larger and far more complex issue of untreated human waste being indiscriminately let out into open areas and water bodies causing grave public health and environmental consequences is yet to be mainstreamed in the national sanitation agenda of most countries in the Asia-Pacific region. A well planned holistic and inclusive approach is required to address this issue.
This showcase would highlight two broad themes:
- The City Wide Inclusive Sanitation in Asia, which will draw from experiences of cities (from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Malaysia) to reinforce the need for disruptive innovations in decentralized sanitation space and use of approaches to particularly benefit the poor, vulnerable and women. The learnings will be relevant to furthering best practices for provision of safe and sustainable sanitation for all in urban areas.
- A ‘Volunteered Information System’ named URBMAN, developed to support better city planning, community-oriented decisions and effective service delivery. It offers pre-defined, built-in algorithms for planning municipal services like environmental sanitation, health delivery, education services, flood risks, ground water potential zones, etc.
The discussions would include aspects such as:
- onsite non-sewerage solutions in the form of decentralized fecal management systems (FSM)
- political will and accountability systems that incentivize service improvements
- administrative capacity and leadership to deploy a range of funding, business and hardware approaches to meet sanitation goals
- gender and social equity in planning and implementation;
- sanitation data, information systems and territorial planning
- the URBMAN: Open-source package for city planning with community plugin
