Co-production of Sanitation Services in Face of Increasing Demand

There is an estimate that there are 600 million people in the world now living in peri-urban homes, which are often ignored by municipal governments due to their inability to provide enough living facilities for the sheer number of people (Ondieki and Mbegera, 2009). 

Fig.1: Peri-urban homes in Durban

As illustrated by Srivastava et al. (2019), the current situation is that a majority of the sanitation facilities are provided by the municipalities or the state departments, whereas no roles or responsibilities are left for non-state or informal sectors. However, this distribution of responsibility has caused many problems such as some areas having no sanitation services because they are out of the municipal jurisdiction, the inability of provision of effective sanitation services in densely populated areas, and the neglect of faecal sludge management of wastewater discharge (Srivastava et al., 2019). With sanitation remaining one of the most pressing issues in Africa today, innovative ways are essential in creating solutions for rapidly growing populations in the city as well as the consequent sanitation crisis (Srivastava et al., 2019). 

Co-production, which is the involvement of citizens in the production of social services, have become increasingly regarded as the solution to current inability of social services production of the municipality (Brandsen and Pestoff, 2006). With the help of private sectors, and non-governmental institutions, there could be co-production of knowledge, service delivery, value chain and co-production across scales (Srivastava et al., 2019). From my perspective, there are two indispensable advantages of employing this stratey. Firstly, the use of co-production enables the possibility of doing ethnographic research.

As I have discussed in my last blog, ethnography plays a huge function in helping government planners or non-governmental sanitation workers get to know the changes in sanitation over time and space and what the function of people are during the whole process (McFarlane et al., 2014). I believe non-governmental workers have more perspectives on the distribution, using experiences, and things to improve, of a variety of sanitary facilities than the municipality does. Secondly, co-production enables for the possibility of having sanitary facilities that fit to the traditional customs considering the fact that different municipalities or quarters have different traditions and customs sometimes. 

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