So, following week four, are you ready to engage your city more in creating an enabling environment? Engineers and practitioners must wear many hats as designers, planners, managers, advocates, lobbyists community liaisons. If we want to ensure that the necessary and inter related legal, organizational financial, political and cultural aspects that all need to be in place for effective fecal sludge management have been accounted for. and these factors are all included as design variables in our approach. it is also important to remember that fecal sludge management on it's own is not a stand-alone solution it needs to be incorporated into a city-wide approach to sanitation This week you've learned the importance of assessing and understanding the initial situation in specific context as sanitation solutions can be very heterogeneous. Not only between countries and cities but also within cities themselves. A thorough assessment ensures that solutions are tailored to meet the actual needs, built on what is existing and takes into account the context specific strengths and constraints. These preliminary steps are required to understand the existing situation before you can start defining the problem that needs to be solved. One example is site selection. Due to the difficulty of obtaining land in urban areas, that is expensive, and not readily available it will already affect technology selection as treatment options that are very land intensive tend to be much less expensive, whereas treatment options that don't require a lot of land tend to be much more expensive. So it's important also to ensure that this site is accessible so it will really be used. An integrated planning approach can help you link all your design variables into standard project phases and helps you to manage when and where to consider each of them. Also, incorporating participatory processes within traditional project cycles, helps to ensure commitment and ownership during during implementation and operation. And success is enhanced by more effective management schemes better institutional setups and integration of the private sector. Integrating stakeholders and understanding their interest and influences should be carried out through the entire project as it is a continuous and iterative process. For more information on an integrated approach to city wide sanitation, please refer to the Sandec MOOC. Planning and design of sanitation systems and technologies. you learned the importance of setting up legal and regulatory frame works for fecal sludge management and introducing enforcement mechanisms. This is necessary to ensure that regulation and enforcement of public health and environmental standards occurs. As fecal sludge management is an essential component of urban sanitation it needs to be included in national policies and also have clear institutional roles at the local level to ensure people take responsibility. Also, considering different models of financial transfers will help to formalize this sector and make it financially sustainable and could include incentives as a method of transition to new management models in the short term. Financial transfers include capital and operations and maintenance costs from the household level to collection and transport service providers to treatment plants and resource recovery. These are a combination of public and/or private parties payments for service, or discharge fees taxes, tariffs and licences. you also learn the importance of incorporating management concerns from the beginning of the project planning. Management aspects need to be linked to decision on technology options. This is especially important when evaluating levels of established, transferring and innovative technologies. It is also important to ensure operations and maintenances built into the ongoing project budget and to ensure demands are appropriate to the local context. All too many treatment plants have failed due to lack of operations and maintenance. And lastly financial considerations are obviously a very important variable at the decision making process selecting different management options. This is complicated with many technologies because they are not yet examples of cost data and it requires many assumptions. Equivalent cost comparisons can be used to compare the capital and operating costs of different technologies with revenue generated from resource recovery incorporated as a positive under operating costs. What design variables did you learn about this week that you did not know about before? Do you think there are any important ones for your city that we did not cover? Please contribute your thoughts to the discussion on the forum website and also visit the additional resources to learn more about the topic. Now we are entering the final week of the MOOC where you will learn about the current status of transferring and innovative technologies for collection, transport, treatment and resource recovery of fecal sludge. This is a very exciting week as it will provide you with more of an idea the ways in which this field is rapidly changing. Then we will provide you with an example of the case study of Durban, South Africa a city that was awarded the Stockholm water prize for their innovative adapted and integrated approach to fecal sludge management and city-wide sanitation. Thanks for joining, see you next week.
