Objectives of SanPack: conceptual change and reorganized materials

Published on: 02/08/2012

SanPack was designed not to duplicate, but to support the work of other organisations and networks that have stressed a services approach to sanitation by reorganizing, and ensuring e-access to, the materials of IRC and partners. Others active in thinking up more effective and sustainable sanitation approaches include in alphabetical order: CLTS network, IDE, IWA, SEI, SuSanA, Triple-S, USAID, WASTE, WASHCost, WaterAid, WEDC and WSP.

Objective 1: Conceptual change

The first objective is to address a number of conceptual issues. Internationally the target for improving sanitation is included in Target 7.C:
To halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation

However, there are a number of important issues that countries and organisations which pursue and support this target do not yet address:

• Access to ‘improved sanitation’ is not the full goal.

The JMP and governments only define access as the number of people who have an improved household toilet. While halving the numbers of people without access is the target for MDG7 on sanitation, the true target is beyond improved toilet access to sustained and hygienic use by all.

• Access to ‘improved sanitation’ is no end station.

Sustained and hygienically used toilets are not the end station, either. When connected to a sewer, the sludge from these toilets may still end up untreated in the environment. This can be defined as postponed large-scale open defecation. For toilets connected to a pit/septic tank being improved depends on what happens when these pits/septic tanks fill up. When the contents leak into the groundwater or are taken out and transported in an unhygienic manner and disposed untreated in water, on land, or in sewers without end-treatment, they are also a form of  large-scale open defecation. In both cases, the excreta are only temporarily taken out of the environment

• ‘On-site’ sanitation is not really on-site.

In the sector, unsewered sanitation is known as on-site and sewered sanitation as off-site. In the light of the above-described full excreta disposal cycles, these terms are no longer correct. In on-site sanitation, excreta are also moved off the site. There are only two exceptions. The first exception is when households seal the pits that are full without risk to the environment and make either new toilets or shift the existing slab and superstructure over a new pit. The second exception is when households have a composting toilet in their plot and they use the urine and/or composted excreta productively on that plot. All other “on-site sanitation” is in fact off-site, just like toilets connected to a sewer, except that the transport is not by water through a pipe.

• Improved sanitation is not a hardware product

In the JMP’s and country definitions, the target is access to a hardware product, namely an accepted type of improved toilet. In the light of the above, the target is not to these products, but to effective services for improved sanitation conditions and practices that cover the full excreta disposal cycle. These services are often by a large number of actors:

• the households themselves (e.g. DIY improved toilets as in CLTS, DIY hygienic emptying and/or end-disposal and use)
• government at various levels (e.g. promotion services for 'improved' sanitation, education services in schools, setting and applying standards)
• the private sector (e.g. production, supply, marketing and sales, transport construction, maintenance and repairs, and emptying services)
• (I)NGOs (e.g. advocacy, sanitation promotion, financing and implementing projects, piloting new approaches)
• universities and research institutes (e.g.fundamental and applied research on sanitation policies, programmes, technologies and services, education)
• knowledge centres (e.g. documenting and sharing knowledge through various media and mechanisms, developing new knowledge through piloting)
• development bank and donors (e.g. (co-)financing new developments and large scale implementation programme)

Objective 2: Reorganized materials of IRC and partners

In 1990 IRC added “and Sanitation” to its then name International Reference Centre for Community Water Supply. Since that year IRC and its partners have done work on specific aspects of rural and urban sanitation. The objective of SanPack is to reorganize this work, fitting it into the new framework and making it more easily accessible to the target groups.

SanPack contains an overview of available methods, techniques and tools in a low-cost, non-sewered sanitation service model. The materials have been developed and used by IRC and its long-standing and more recent partners in the South and the North in some 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. 

We have also contacted and invited other organisations to fill specific gaps in these materials, for instance on adults and children with disabilities, to ensure updates, for instance on households with HIV-infected members, and menstrual hygiene.