E4D Fellow: Dorothee Spuhler

Project description

Much has been invested to improve sanitation coverage worldwide. However, the high number of inoperative facilities shows dramatically that there are some substantial deficits with non-technical issues of their implementation. Conventional sanitation planning has been top-down focusing on toilet provision leaving out other important aspects such as wastewater treatment downstream. This has led to inappropriate technology choice, lack of ownership and a high number of failing projects. The situation is particularly challenging in expanding urban areas of developing countries where most of the current global population growth is taking place.

To select an appropriate and sustainable sanitation system in a given context is a complex multi-criteria decision making problem. As novel technologies emerge, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the best option. Structured decision-making (SDM) can help to tackle such complex situations by combining environmental engineering and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to identify trade-offs and balancing for opposing interests. So far research was focusing on the selection procedure, assuming that the options to choose from are already given. This thesis aims at providing systematic methods (1) to generate locally appropriate sanitation decision options at the structuring phase; and (2) to quantify performance indicators of a broad range of sanitation systems at the scale of a city as input into the strategic sanitation planning.