Post - 2015 Sustainable Development Goals
Learning from the MDGs: Improved sanitation, drainage in cities
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W
orld leaders have agreed on the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs), but arguably Goal
six -- the water and sanitation goal -- will have the hardest
job building on the work undertaken by the previous
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). A timely
special double edition of the journal Environment and
Urbanization on “Sanitation and drainage in cities”
explores persistent gaps in urban sanitation provision and
ways to address them.
The water MDG was widely acknowledged as the furthest
from delivering against its objective, with criticism largely
leveled at Target 7.C, which aimed to ‘halve, by 2015, the
proportion of the population without sustainable access to
safe drinking water and basic sanitation’.
Across two issues of the journal, 22 papers tackle
sanitation globally, alongside specific case studies and
issues within Mongolia, Zimbabwe, Haiti, South Africa,
Mozambique, Ghana, China, Zambia, Tanzania, and
several cities in India.
Topics include:
• different technical models (container-based toilets,
closed-loop system)
• ways of assessing sanitation quality (sanitation
scores in Indian cities, a new system to measure
sanitary risks in Maputo)
• differential impacts of sanitation on certain groups
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Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • November - December 2015
(urban poor adolescent girls in
Bengaluru, women and girls
affected by sanitation-related
violence, the poor and socially
excluded in Shanghai)
frameworks for understanding
sanitation (“sanitation cityscape,”
“sites of entitlement”)
financing models (limitations to
market- based services in East
Africa, user willingness to pay in
urban Haiti, public toilets in Ghana)
contextual factors for understanding
sanitation (history in Dar es Salaam,
a case study of Lusaka)
• participation and inclusion
(community-managed
programmes in India, civil society
partnership in Mumbai, reflections
Mumbai on inclusive sanitation, co-
production of inclusive sanitation
in Zimbabwe, stormwater d