Dear Tanti,

Thanks for the comment...I also went through your thesis; excellent & impressive work! congratulation. Actually I saw your three above mentioned points there as well. I am reading these days different related literature, and would like to you back in case of any need, if you & Dorothee don't mind.

Thanks,
Hussain

Dear Dorothee,

Thanks for the detailed response...I will go through those links and materials.

Regarding matrix framework; I am thinking to use SuSanA Sustainability Criteria against sanitation planning steps ( from different sources & adopted to my own cases in Kabul City-Afghanistan) at two different dimensions...sill this is not developed very well, but for the criteria looking for some suitable local and widely accepted global indicators. Also for the different stages of sanitation planning I think looking at approaches like CLUES, some documents like McConvilles' papers, Tanti Thesis..would be useful but at the end I need to consider the context and adopt these approaches at the implemented project in my own case study. This is the overal idea, but still need to be concreted enough.

Cheers,
Hussain

Dear Hussain,

There are several set of sustainable sanitation indicators suggested by organizations and researchers as Dorothee has mentioned. The challenge is to transfer the ‘global’ criteria and objectives of sustainability to our particular case study; so that the derived indicators are appropriate for our local context and we are measuring/ monitoring the right issues with these indicators. Therefore a bottom-up approach is recommended, in order to understand the real situations on the field (e.g: problems, limitations) and what the stakeholders really need.

Regarding the assessment method, I guess first of all you should know:
1. How will these indicators be used/ presented for analysis (e.g: for desk analysis, discussed in a FGD)?
2. Who will be the users of your indicators? This includes their level of knowledge, skills and familiarity with computer software.
3. How is the data availability and reliability to support the indicators?

At least these all three will determine which assessment method you might propose for your case study. In the end, as the designer we have to make sure that the indicators are operable by the intended users and can be assessed using available data.

Best regards,
Tanti

Dear Dorothee,

Thanks for your comprehensive & detailed answer, I will go through those links and documents...

Cheers,
Hussain

Dear Hussain

There are many examples of sustainability criteria and indicator framework for sustainable sanitation, sanitation in general, sustainability in general or related issues.
Even though the sector agrees on the global objectives that sustainable sanitation has to fulfill: www.susana.org/en/about/sustainable-sanitation
To translate those into indicators which are transparent, understandable and realistically calculable is a challenging tasks. Moreover, there are important methodological issues related to value functions for stakeholder preferences, indicator inter-dependencies or aggregation effects …
I highly recommend you to follow the current discussion here: forum.susana.org/forum/categories/185-th...he-sanitation-ladder

The question is whether this is just something you need in order to implement your research, or if this issue takes part of your PhD research questions?
In both cases, I recommend you to due a literature review starting with e.g. some old documents from the netssaf project: www2.gtz.de/Dokumente/oe44/ecosan/en-san...ty-criteria-2008.pdf or www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/26932885/...-conventional-susana and moving then to more scientific staff like

Balkema, A.J., Preisig, H.A., Otterpohl, R. and Lambert, F.J. (2002) Indicators for the sustainability assessment of wastewater treatment systems. Urban water 4(2), 153-161.

Kvarnström, E. and Petersens, E.a. (2004) Open planning of sanitation systems, EcoSanRes Programme.

Kvarnström, E., McConville, J., Bracken, P., Johansson, M. and Fogde, M. (2011) The sanitation ladder – a need for a revamp? Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development 1(1), 3.

Lienert, J., Scholten, L., Egger, C. and Maurer, M. (2014) Structured decision-making for sustainable water infrastructure planning and four future scenarios. EURO Journal on Decision Processes (!Useful objective hierarchy in annex!)

And of course the thesis of Tanti (see below) or Buren on SANCHIS: Buuren, J.C.L.v. (2010) SANitation CHoice Involving Stakeholders A participatory multi-criteria method for drainage and sanitation system selection in developing cities Applied in ho chi minh city, Vietnam, Wageningen University.

Another approach then Matrix - you may consider Multi-criteria Decision Analysis or a score card options - but it would be helpful if you could elaborate a little bit more on what aou mean with "matrix frame work""?

Cheers, Dorothee

Hi All,

My name is Hussain...working on my PhD. I am planning to use SuSanA Sustainability Criteria for my research and want to use matrix frame work for my case study analysis. All local indicators for above-mentioned criteria would be determined by myself through site visits, interview...but I need to know is there any set of global indicators developed by SuSanA itself for its criteria?

Also can you suggest me another tool except matrix to use for sustainability analysis?

Thanks,
Hussain

Dear Mughal,

Basically the tool (SusTA) is applicable for both shared- and unimproved sanitation facilities. The set of indicators (Table 9.7) provides universal principles to assess sanitation technologies in developing countries’ context.

Regarding shared facilities:
The quantitative assessments such as: cost, energy, water and land requirements are calculated based on the amount of consumption or expenditure in household’s level. Therefore, these indicators are applicable for both private and shared facilities. The other indicators such as: "social acceptance" and "technical skill required" have been designed to accommodate shared facilities as well. I provided several assessment matrices in Appendix 3 of the dissertation to demonstrate how we can use the same set of indicators to analyze both private and shared facilities.

Regarding unimproved facilities:
We can still use the same indicators to assess unimproved sanitation facilities. Obviously there will be several ‘low fulfillment’ scores, such as ‘BOD removal’ and ‘Health risks caused by the system’.

Regarding gender aspect:
I did not specifically address gender issue, but there are several indicators in the tool that address societal issues in general. I expressed these issues within indicators’ fulfillment conditions (Table 9.7, column 4,5,6). For example:
• “social acceptance” discusses whether a technology is in accordance with society’s principles and norms. This can be used to assess which technology (in user interface part) is less or more vulnerable to violence. The result might differ from one society to another. I was in the village where all shared facilities have no doors. Because the society takes care of each other, women feel saver to be in a toilet or bathroom without doors.
• “technical skill required” analyses whether a technology is suitable for the intended operators (including women as caretakers). Or it can be used to assess: which level of skill is needed to run this technology.
• “health risks caused by the system” evaluates which technology minimizes the contact between users/operators to wastewater. We can still use this principle in analyzing a technology, using women as our main users.

I find the idea of specifically including gender aspect in the tool is important. I am still improving the tool- particularly in the fulfillment conditions’ parts.

Regards,
Tanti

Dear Tanti,

With reference to the JMP’s sanitation ladder (Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation – Special Focus on Sanitation, UNICEF/WHO, 2008, pp 6), I believe, the Sustainability-based Sanitation Planning Tool (SusTA), that you have developed, would apply to the “improved sanitation facilities.” My question is: Does the tool also apply to the “shared sanitation facilities,” and “unimproved sanitation facilities?”

In addition, does your tool consider gender aspect? In rural areas of Pakistan, women look after the sanitation facilities. Please have a look at: Expert’s Take: Gender perspectives on sanitation for sustainable development; An op-ed by Begoña Lasagabaster, Acting Head of UN Women’s Policy Division, to mark World Toilet Day (www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2014/11/...tainable-development), disseminated by Cor Dietvorst (E-Source Sanitation News, 23 Nov 2014).

Regards,

F H Mughal

Dear Muchie,

Tanti gave this link to her PhD thesis in her post on 3 Oct. (please scrol up):

e-pub.uni-weimar.de/opus4/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2222

Hope this help,
Elisabeth

Dear

This is a very interesting discussion, I would like to get your article.
Where can we found your paper or dissertation?
If have a copy can you send it to me please
My address is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Many thanks

Dear Muchie,

I am very sorry for this late reply. I was away for a survey and just back to my desk last week.

I try to answer your first question:

Regarding indicators ranking: I proposed one set of sustainability-based indicators to assess the technologies. The stakeholder groups then rank the indicators based on their preferences.
The technology options are evaluated based on their degree of fulfillment to this set of indicators. Therefore, I equipped each indicator with a rating scale (1 to 3, with 1 corresponds to the highest fulfillment). Please refer to my dissertation report, Table 9.7, page 111-114.

There are several ways to obtain the threshold values of these 1 to 3- scales/ high- to low fulfillment:
- Referring to national regulation (e.g. indicators “Investment cost” and indicator “BOD removal efficiency”
- Using the data from household questionnaires (e.g. indicators “Water consumption” and “Land required”)
- Based on my personal judgments (e.g. indicators “ Compatibility” and “Health risk”)
However, each project area has different threshold. Therefore I also provide references to modify the threshold values, based on analytical generalization (see Table 9.7, last column).

The next step is to assess the technology options: how well does each technology meet the indicators’ fulfillment? For this assessment, I refer to literature and also use my personal judgments. Please refer to Appendix 3 and Appendix 4 of the dissertation report. To support the personal judgment, one should have the knowledge on the technologies, the context where the technologies will be applied and how they will interact.

The final selection of the most sustainable technology can be conducted in several ways, as long as the transparency provided:
1. based on the indicators’ ranking that have been defined by stakeholders.
2. based on single important issue, e.g. economic (indicators “Investment cost” or “Operational and maintenance cost”)
3. based on the frequency of a technology meeting the indicators’ best thresholds (scale 1).
4. aggregating the scores.


Concerning your second question: I am not sure, which of my paper you refer. Could you clarify this first?

Best regards,
Tanti

Dear Tantinayano

thank you so much for your advice. By the way I already had your thesis, I must say its really a piece of good work. As for my research (PhD) its closely related to what you did but i will be looking at the sustainability of JMP improved technologies n Zimbabwe context hoping to draw lessons for SSA. However problem is like I pointed earlier and which you stressed in your dissertation is lack of data. And my department is engineering it is more concerned with measurements but looking at the scope of my work it is nearly impossible to carry out measurements for all the 6 sanitation systems I intend to assess. I understand for ranking of indicators you used stakeholder judgement(many others have used this) but it is not clear which approach you used to rate the technologies. did you use your personal judgement based on results from questionnaires? I noticed in one of your papers you mentioned the 0 alternative (also used by Lenartsson et al), is that what you used in the study?

thank you once again. will definitely keep in touch for more suggestions and advice on my work

regards
Muchie