The invisibility of sanitation. Water and sanitation infrastructure and services face serious quality issues (limited hours of service, unexpected outages, provision of unsafe water, etc.) and increasingly fail to adapt to environmental conditions or meet the required scale.
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November 19 was designated as World Toilet Day by the United Nations to raise awareness about the urgent situation faced by approximately 3.5 billion people.
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For the past 10 years, we have offered the Container-Based Sanitation (CBS) service to homes that still lack connection to the water and sewage network. Currently, we serve more than 1,400 homes in over 220 human settlements in San Juan de Miraflores, Villa María del Triunfo, and Villa El Salvador. We join the commitment and ongoing efforts of the community organizations in these districts to demand their rights to water, sanitation, and housing.
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Water is a human right, but who is the ‘human’? Celebrating World Water Day by remembering that water is a human right feels hollow.
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This case study examines the container-based sanitation (CBS) service provided by x-runner in the low-income formal/informal settlements in peri-urban Lima. x-runner provides a safe sanitation chain in poor nonsewered neighborhoods in the hills of the outskirts of southwest Lima for a population that does not have (and probably will not have for some years) any safe or hygienic alternative. x-runner operates in difficult-to-access areas, sometimes relying on lockers for users to drop off their sealed full containers. The company is leveraging the capacities of its suppliers to reduce the complexity of its business to a manageable level and the number of customers has been growing steadily, with an average of around 24 new households per month. Although some customers expressed the view that the price for the service is high, they appear to be willing to pay it and the level of satisfaction with the service for x-runner customers is high. Going forward, an explicit recognition of CBS—or a category into which CBS clearly falls—as a viable sanitation system for the urban poor, would be an important factor for enabling public sector support.
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