Design of a Sanitation Risk Assessment for Urban Communities in African Cities

In Africa, the progress to expand access to sanitation services has been slow. A challenge to improving sanitation systems in African cities is a lack of data and reliable information about the existing situation, to plan and prioritise investments. There are limited robust methods to gather data for planning. Conventional methods such as household surveys are time consuming and expensive to undertake, particularly at scale in large cities. Community participation in decision making is widely regarded as essential to achieving sustainable projects, but in urban environments top-down approaches are more common. This research develops and applies a rapid and participatory risk assessment tool to collect baseline data to inform urban sanitation planning and to improve community participation in decision making. The research uses a mixed method approach and participatory action research principles to undertake two case studies in Maputo, Mozambique and Kampala, Uganda. The tool gathers information on sanitation conditions at a local level. The indicators and tool are tested and validated by comparing and triangulating their results with those from conventional household surveys, transect walks and available secondary data. Results show that the tool is easy to use and provides a rapid and cost-effective method to collect data, which provides a good approximation of sanitation risk at a neighbourhood leve