Water Papers

183 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16997

Water Papers are produced by the Water Global Practice, taking up the work of the predecessor Water Unit, Transport, Water and ICT Department, Sustainable Development Vice Presidency.

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 34

Wastewater Treatment and Reuse: A Guide to Help Small Towns Select Appropriate Options

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-31) Brault, Jean-Martin ; Buchauer, Konrad ; Gambrill, Martin

Small towns in low- and middle-income countries are growing rapidly and struggling to meet the increased demands of wastewater collection and treatment. To avert public health crises and continued environmental degradation, small towns are actively seeking safely managed sanitation solutions, appropriate for their scale, institutional capacity, financial resources, and overarching needs. This document is designed to provide a guide of small-town wastewater treatment processes in order to assist engineers, managers and other stakeholders responsible for wastewater service provision in identifying and selecting appropriate wastewater treatment processes for small towns. This guide is part of a World Bank suite of tools and other material to support World Bank teams and their government counterparts in the planning, design, and implementation of sanitation projects in urbanizing areas. Addressing the specific context of small towns, the format of this guide begins with an introduction of key concepts for a decision maker to understand and then applies a suggested five-step approach to exploring appropriate wastewater treatment technologies, culminating with case studies from three regions applying this approach. It delves into the unique considerations for small-town wastewater treatment and the exploration of corresponding technologies. Before demonstrating the application of the approach, the guide also navigates: (a) factors external to the technologies that define the characteristics and environment of a given small town and that will affect technology choice; and (b) technology-specific information that will ultimately influence decision making. Before embarking on the formal planning and design process, the user is highly encouraged to become familiar with the guide methodology in its entirety while drawing on the principles of the Citywide Inclusive Sanitation approach.
Seeing the Invisible: A Strategic Report on Groundwater Quality

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-23) Ravenscroft, Peter ; Lytton, Lucy

This report describes why, and how, groundwater quality is vital to human health, agriculture, industry and the environment. In turn, this explains why it is so important to World Bank staff and clients, as well as diverse managers and administrators in countries and economies at all stages of development.
Practical Manual on Groundwater Quality Monitoring

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-20) Ravenscroft, Peter ; Lytton, Lucy

This is a companion volume to “Seeing the Invisible: A Strategic Report on Groundwater Quality,” which explains why groundwater quality is so important to managers of development programs in the World Bank and elsewhere. Its purpose is to provide managers and their teams with practical guidance on how to set up and manage a groundwater quality monitoring program. It provides a logical, step-by-step approach that can be tailored to, and grow with, the capacity to implement such a program. The guiding principle is that monitoring is the fundamental activity that shapes our identification of issues, the framing of problems, the design of solutions, and the measurement of the effectiveness of those solutions. Monitoring is often seen as simple and undervalued, but monitoring of groundwater quality, and its interpretation, is technically demanding. On the other hand, it is also extremely rewarding.
Connecting the Unconnected: Approaches for Getting Households to Connect to Sewerage Networks

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11-19) Kennedy-Walker, Ruth ; Mehta, Nishtha ; Thomas, Seema ; Gambrill, Martin

Citywide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) aims to shift the urban sanitation paradigm to focus on the whole sanitation service chain and access for all, especially the poor, and promotes a range of solutions—both onsite and sewered, centralized or decentralized—tailored to the realities of the world's burgeoning cities. CWIS focuses on service provision and its enabling environment rather than on just building infrastructure. Where sewers are indeed used as part of a city's response to urban sanitation, a reoccurring challenge is commonly found: despite their proximity to trunk sewerage infrastructure, too many households choose not to connect to the sewers for various social, economic, and/or related reasons. Fortunately, successful programs around the world have tackled this challenge and have managed to connect the unconnected using both conventional and nonconventional sewerage approaches. This guide documents those experiences and identifies key issues that require consideration and processes to be adopted when planning, designing, and implementing programs that focus on maximizing household connections to new or expanded sewerage networks and when undertaking post-investment activities to ensure that all households connect to existing sewerage networks. The guide focuses on households, but the outlined approach also applies to businesses, industries, and other nondomestic customers that discharge wastewater directly to the environment.
Testing, Piloting, and Validation of the Rural Water Indicator Global Framework in the African Context

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03-12) Banks, Brian ; Mendez-Castillo, Ethel ; Vargas-Ramirez, Miguel ; Zimmermann, Sabrina ; Loughnan, Libbet

This document presents the findings of the pilot conducted in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Sierra Leone to determine the feasibility and utility of the indicators proposed by the World Bank in the Rural Water Metrics Global Framework. Through standard indicators, the proposed framework aims to facilitate improvements in national and global reporting and analysis, which would improve rural water services around the world. This document provides background on the framework; shows how it relates to other efforts to harmonize rural water data; and outlines development of the framework. It also describes the pilot—its methodology, findings, and limitations—and offers recommendations regarding the indicators themselves; suggests an implementation approach; and proposes a pathway for collection of the data using integration into national monitoring framework.
Water and Sanitation Services for Informal Settlements in Honiara, Solomon Islands

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10) World Bank

The objective of this study was to inform Solomon Water of potential service delivery models for the expansion of water and sanitation services in informal settlements in Honiara. Currently, a range of water service delivery models are in use by residents of settlements. As described below, many of do not result in safe and affordable drinking and domestic water. Similarly, a range of sanitation practices are in use, most are not likely to result in safe containment of human waste. Solomon Water is currently expanding and improving its water and sanitation services in Honiara, and other regional towns urban center's. As a part of this improvement and expansion agenda, there is the opportunity to improve the water and sanitation services used by residents of informal settlements. In recognition of the diversity of environmental, social and economic diversity amongst urban residents in Honiara’s informal settlements, a range of water and sanitation service delivery models may need to be offered. This assessment identifies the range of possible water and sanitation service models, and, with input from Solomon Water, informal settlement residents and other stakeholders, together with analytical information and lessons about service delivery models used elsewhere, makes recommendations about the water and sanitation service options best suited to informal Honiara’s settlements.
Safely Managed Sanitation in High-Density Rural Areas: Turning Fecal Sludge into a Resource through Innovative Waste Management

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-09-01) Verhagen, Joep ; Scott, Pippa

Safely managed sanitation is a focus of the SDGs and central to stunting reduction and early childhood survival, both identified by the World Bank's Human Capital Index as critical for humans to develop their full potential. In 2015, 4.5 billion people lacked access to safely managed sanitation. This paper finds that hundreds of millions more people are exposed to significant health risks due to unsafely managed sanitation. This report explores the challenges of fecal sludge management (FSM) in densely populated rural areas and it presents some typical current practices, examples of financially sustainable FSM services, and global innovations in waste management with potential replicability for FSM. Its aim is to promote dialogue on how to move from the Millennium Development Goals' approach to rural sanitation—effectively, building toilets—to the Sustainable Development Goals' approach: safely managed sanitation systems. The paper concludes that the sanitation service chain spans both private and public goods, and market mechanisms are not always adequate to mitigate the safety risks. Public funding will be needed to cover the affordability gap and address safely managed sanitation, requiring a clear and long-term commitment and support from government. The case is similar to that for networked sanitation: without public support, improving the safety of existing FSM services is likely to decrease profit margins and potentially render businesses unviable.
Improving Sanitation in Cold Regions: Catalog of Technical Options for Household-Level Sanitation

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Leblanc, Maryanne ; Reed, Robert A. ; Kingdom, William ; Gambrill, Martin ; Rodriguez, Diego Juan

Globally, 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation. Improving sanitation is a challenge around the world; cold climates add to that challenge. The objective of this Catalog is to identify suitable technological options for delivering sustainable improved sanitation in cold regions where the population is not served by piped water supply and sewer networks.
Evaluating the Potential of Container-Based Sanitation: Clean Team in Kumasi, Ghana

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02-14) World Bank

This study is focused on Clean Team, a social enterprise providing container-based sanitation (CBS) services in Kumasi, the second-largest city in Ghana with a population of 2.7 million in 2018. Clean Team is owned by Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), a nonprofit partnership between the private sector, civil society, and academia. Clean Team delivers a single service: rental and regular servicing of in-house portable toilets, which includes transporting feces to a centralized treatment facility but not the processing and reuse of excreta. Customers find the Clean Team toilet appealing and Clean Team services are affordable compared to other alternatives. External subsidies, provided through public and philanthropic grant funding, have been necessary for Clean Team to cover its costs. Clean Team has been working, with support from funders and external advisers, on improving the efficiency of its services and reducing costs. Going forward, Clean Team could benefit from a clearer policy environment, which would allow them to increase the scale of their operations based on a more cost-efficient business model.
Reviewing National Sanitation to Reach Sustainable Development Goals

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-05) Gibson, Jim ; Eales, Kathy ; Nsubuga-Mugga, Chris

The government of Uganda has given strong emphasis to eradicating open defecation and to encouraging people to invest in safe containment systems. Funding to local governments is spurring sanitation improvement on a significant scale. But as the pace of urbanization picks up in the country and the scale and density of urban settlements rise, local authorities and the ministries that support and service these areas will need to give greater attention to safe management of wastes beyond the on-site facilities of individual users. The SDGs shift the sanitation sector’s targets beyond a measurement of how many people have access to an adequate toilet and define outcomes in terms of safe management of human wastes across the whole service chain. It is only by understanding and managing the processes associated with each component in the chain, and ensuring they link and align with the preceding and subsequent components, that one can begin to define strategic interventions to improve the performance of the system. Developing insight into the nature of these processes and related activities will help to clarify the responsibilities, functions, and possibility for intervention by the various role-players and ministries in the sector as they strive for the realization of the objectives defined by the Sustainable Development Goals