Browsing by Author "Anciano, Fiona"

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    Comparative sanitation data from high-frequency phone surveys across 3 countries
    (Elsevier, 2024-06-26) Lewis, Amy R.; Bell, Andrew R.; Casas, Ana; Kupiec-Teahan, Beata; Mendoza Sanchez, José; Willcock, Simon; Anciano, Fiona; Barrington, Dani J.; Dube, Mmeli; Hutchings, Paul; Karani, Caroline; Llaxacondor, Arturo; López, Hellen; Mdee, Anna L.; Ofori, Alesia D.; Riungu, Joy N.; Russel, Kory C.; Parker, Alison H.
    With less than half of the worldʼs urban population having safely managed sanitation due to the high cost and difficulty of building sewers and treatment plants, many rely on off-grid options like pit latrines and septic tanks, which are hard to empty and often lead to illegal waste dumping; this research focuses on container-based sanitation (CBS) as an emerging off-grid solution. Off-grid sanitation refers to waste management systems that operate independently of centralized infrastructure and CBS is a service providing toilets that collect human waste in sealable containers, which are regularly emptied and safely disposed of. These data relate to a project investigating CBS in Kenya, Peru, and South Africa, focusing on how different user groups access and utilize sanitation – contrasting CBS with other types. Participants, acting as citizen scientists, collected confidential data through a dedicated smartphone app designed by the authors and external contractors. This project aimed to explore the effective scaling, management, and regulation of off-grid sanitation systems, relevant to academics in urban planning, water and sanitation services, institutional capability, policy and governance, and those addressing inequality and poverty reduction. The 12-month data collection period offered participants small incentives for weekly engagement, in a micro payment for micro tasks approach. Participants were randomly selected, attended a training workshop, and (where needed) were given a smartphone which they could keep at the end of the project. We conducted weekly smartphone surveys in over 300 households across informal settlements. These surveys aimed to understand human-environment interactions by capturing daily life, wellbeing, income, infrastructural service use, and socioeconomic variables at a weekly resolution, contributing to more informed analyses and decision-making. The smartphone-based approach offers efficient, cost-effective, and flexible data collection, enabling extensive geographical coverage, broad subject areas, and frequent engagement. The Open Data Kit (ODK) tools were used to support data collection in the resource-constrained environment with limited or intermittent connectivity.
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    An evaluation of different provision strategies for scaled-up container-based sanitation
    (IWA Publishing, 2021-09-17) Ferguson, Charlie; Mallory, Adrian; Hutchings, Paul; Remington, Claire; Lloyd, Erica; Kiogora, Domenic; Anciano, Fiona; Parker, Alison
    Container-based sanitation (CBS) is increasingly used to provide safely managed sanitation in low-income urban settlements. However, questions remain around the viability of scaling up the technology, partly because it relies on regular emptying and servicing of containers by a CBS provider. This paper investigates mechanisms by which this process can be achieved efficiently. Three separate collection strategies are evaluated for their routing efficiencies as CBS goes to scale. An open-source route optimisation solver determines the constituent driving and walking distances necessary for each strategy and has been applied in areas of Cape Town, Cap-Haïtien, Lima and Nairobi. The results indicate that with fewer users (e.g. 50) transfer station models offer the shortest driving routes. However, these do require users to carry their containers (e.g. up to 170 m when stations are 100 m apart). As the number of users increases (e.g. to 5,000), visiting individual houses from a neighbourhood depot offers increasingly efficient driving distances. Overall, however, the results suggest that economies in collection distances for scaled CBS will be largely conditional on greater vehicle capacity (rather than any particular provision strategy). This highlights the importance of road access throughout low-income urban settlements in providing a viable CBS service at scale.
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    On a journey to citywide inclusive sanitation (CWIS)? A political economy analysis of container-based sanitation (CBS) in the fragmented (in)formal city
    (Taylor and Francis, 2025) Mdee, Anna; Ofori, Alesia Dedaa; Barrington, Dani; Anciano, Fiona; Dube, Mmeli; Hutchings, Paul; Kramer, Sasha; López-Valladares, Hellen; Parker, Alison; Riungu, Joy Nyawira; Ward, Christopher
    Rapidly growing cities face the chronic challenge of access to safe, dignified and accessible sanitation, in contexts of inequality and informality. Technological and operational innovations, such as container-based sanitation (CBS), are promoted as relatively low-cost market-based circular economy off-grid solutions to deliver citywide inclusive sanitation (CWIS). However, in the absence of evidence that CBS is delivering on these promises, this paper asks: under what conditions can CBS services contribute to achieving CWIS goals? It applies a combined political economy and socio-technical regime analysis to examine multi-level governance in the sanitation sector and CBS service regimes in Cape Town, Lima, Nairobi and Cap-Haitien. Only Cape Town, a municipality-controlled system, demonstrates the necessary public authority that enables CBS to operate at scale. Yet, it is regarded by many residents in informal settlements as poor sanitation for poor people. This suggests that scaling CBS requires sustained public investment and strong coordinating authority.
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    A qualitative study on resource barriers facing scaled container-based sanitation service chains
    (IWA Publishing, 2022-02-22) Ferguson, Charlie; Mallory, Adrian; Anciano, Fiona; Russell, Kory; del Rocio Lopez Valladares, Hellen; Riungu, Joy; Parker, Alison
    Container-based sanitation (CBS) is an increasingly recognised form of off-grid sanitation provision appropriate for impoverished urban environments. To ensure a safely managed and sustainable service, a managing organisation must implement a service chain that performs robustly and cost-effectively, even with an expanding customer base. These ‘CBS operators’ adopt varying approaches to achieve this objective. Following research including interviews with representatives from six current CBS operators, this paper presents a generalised diagrammatic model of a CBS service chain and discusses the three broad thematic challenges currently faced by these organisations. Supplying cover material is a universal problem with hidden challenges when taking advantage of freely available resources. There is no universally applicable approach for the efficient collection of faecal waste despite the high labour costs of waste collection. The best strategy depends on the CBS operator's overall expansion strategy and the location of fixed features within the served community. Although CBS is technically well-suited to being turned into new products within the circular economy, in practice, this requires a diverse range of skills from CBS operators and is hampered by slow growth in other organic waste recovery services and unhelpful regulation.