Plans to improve access to sanitation in towns and cities of the global South are hampered by multiple challenges. One is a lack of reliable information. In particular, global and national-level data often diverge from data on particular settlements, collected by inhabitants of those settlements themselves. Local data highlight the inadequacy of living conditions -- and in so doing evidence the difficulties in securing improvements. Another challenge lies in the setting of standards around acceptable sanitation. At a global level, for instance, shared sanitation is not considered part of "improved" sanitation. Yet the reality for many low-income urban populations is that communal sanitation can be hygienic, cost-effective and locally acceptable.
The difficulties in reaching a consensus around data and standards point to the importance of diverse approaches to increasing and improving sanitation, including considering both on-site and off-site solutions. They also highlight how crucial it is for the planning and implementation of all such solutions to be inclusive of those often missing from global debates, such as the low-income urban groups that cannot afford substantial sanitation spending. Financial and political commitments, drawing on the circumstances and approaches articulated by low-income groups themselves, will be key to securing a future in which everyone has access to the sanitation they need.
- The discrepancy between the global figures and the information about specific locations may be due to a multitude of factors, and it may be that the global summary does not misrepresent the available data on the situation faced by urban residents in the global South.
- Global standards may be helpful to global monitoring but they may also be very misleading. Risks can be minimized if the SDG monitoring is itself participatory, setting global standards through a consultative process, and recognizing that towns and cities have to decide what works for them, and how improvements can be achieved.
- Investments need to be appropriate, affordable, locally owned and in many cases progressive, with a systematic capacity for further incremental improvement.
- There is increasing recognition of the importance of politics in determining the scale of basic services and social provisioning and the rules by which access is secured.
- It is important to make sure action on global goals addresses rather than exacerbates the lack of access to basic services in many towns and cities of the global South.
- It is evident that the importance of the city scale is increasingly being recognized as critical to improved outcomes, with a number of recent projects exploring city-wide interventions.