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INTRODUCTION
More than 1 million people per day must gain and maintain access to safely managed sanitation to meet the sanitation target of the sustainable development goals (Mara & Evans 2018). A significant majority of this ‘new’ sanitation investment will be made in urban or urbanising areas. While standalone household and community sanitation services will continue to be important in rural areas (in both rich and poor countries) in denser urban areas, toilets that provide sanitation at home must be planned and operated as part of a professionalised service – which transports excreta either through pipes or road-based networks for management away from the home.
A key challenge for SDG 6.2 arises from the dearth of reliable and comparable benchmark estimates of the unit costs of these ‘networked’ services (Daudey 2017). Compared to other infrastructure services, costing in sanitation is characterised by ambiguity concerning both terminology and costing standards. Other sectors tend to employ familiar, readily understood, summary indicators for the global comparison of costs (Merrow 2011; Ansar et al. 2014; Locatelli et al. 2017). For example, the concept of the cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy is well established (De Roo & Parsons 2011; Geissmann & Ponta 2017; Lai & McCulloch 2017) and its utility in comparing the costs of services can be easily understood even by a layperson. By contrast, there is no agreed metric for comparison of the costs of sanitation delivery (Daudey 2017).
This paper reports early findings from the Cost and Climate for Urban Sanitation (CACTUS) project which aims to fill some of this gap. We introduce a proposed standard cost metric for urban sanitation, Total Annualised Cost per Household (TACH) and per Capita (TACC), and propose a strategy for developing a parametric method that would enable the estimation of TACH/TACC for new sanitation systems around the world. We also describe a Novel Ball-Park Reporting Approach (NPBRA) which is aiding in the establishment of a global database of empirical benchmark costs as a basis for this future parametric cost estimation tool. Indicative early results from the global database of NPBRA data are presented.
THE CHALLENGE OF COSTING IN URBAN SANITATION
In a recent systematic review, Daudey (2017) observes a dearth of reliable studies reporting clearly on the full costs...