Preprint Article Version 2 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

What Proportion Counts? Disaggregating Access to Safely Managed Sanitation in an Emerging Town in Tanzania

Hans C. Komakech
* ORCID logo ,
Francis Moyo
,
Oscar Veses Roda
,
Revocatus L. Machunda
,
Om P. Gautam
,
Kyla M. Smith
,
Sandy Cairncross
Version 1 : Received: 3 August 2019 / Approved: 6 August 2019 / Online: 6 August 2019 (03:27:05 CEST)
Version 2 : Received: 24 August 2019 / Approved: 26 August 2019 / Online: 26 August 2019 (09:08:09 CEST)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Komakech, H.C.; Moyo, F.; Roda, O.V.; Machunda, R.L.; Smith, K.M.; Gautam, O.P.; Cairncross, S. What Proportion Counts? Disaggregating Access to Safely Managed Sanitation in an Emerging Town in Tanzania. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 3328. Komakech, H.C.; Moyo, F.; Roda, O.V.; Machunda, R.L.; Smith, K.M.; Gautam, O.P.; Cairncross, S. What Proportion Counts? Disaggregating Access to Safely Managed Sanitation in an Emerging Town in Tanzania. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 3328.

Abstract

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2 sets an ambitious target of leaving no one without adequate sanitation by 2030. The key concern is the lack of local human and financial capital to fund the collection of reliable information to monitor progress towards the goal. As a result, national and local records may be telling a different story of the proportion of safely managed sanitation that counts towards achieving the SDGs. This paper unveils such inconsistency in sanitation data generated by urban authorities and proposes a simple approach for collecting reliable and verifiable information on access to safely managed sanitation. The paper is based on a study conducted in Babati Town Council in Tanzania. Using a smartphone-based survey tool, city health officers were trained to map 17,383 housing units in the town. A housing unit may comprise of two or more households. The findings show that 5% practice open defecation, while 82% of the housing units have some forms of sanitation. Despite the extensive coverage, only 31% of the faecal sludge generated is safely contained, while 64% is not. This study demonstrates the possibility of using simple survey tools to collect reliable data for monitoring progress towards safely managed sanitation in the towns of global south.

Keywords

small towns; mapping; urban sanitation; access; SDG; Tanzania

Subject

Environmental and Earth Sciences, Environmental Science

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Comments (1)

Comment 1
Received: 26 August 2019
Commenter: Hans C Komakech
Commenter's Conflict of Interests: Author
Comment: We revised paper based on comments of 4 reviewers. Also we have changed the co-author list.
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