Enabling Sanitation Enterprises in Low and Middle-Income Countries

Abstract

Background: Despite decades of effort, approximately 3.5 billion people across the globe still lack access to safely managed sanitation due to limited public funding, rapid urbanization, poor governance, and a changing climate. Social enterprises that use innovative business models to provide onsite sanitation services, also known as sanitation enterprises, are considered an emerging solution in many lower and middle-income countries. However, sanitation enterprises have not yet successfully substituted public provision at scale.

Aims & Methods: The objective of this work was to determine the barriers that sanitation enterprises encounter in lower and middle-income countries. We used the Q-method, with a Q-set of 25 statements, to identify major barriers and groups of dominant perception for 19 sanitation enterprises with operations across 20 countries.

Results & Conclusion: Results show that reaching economies of scale is the biggest obstacle for sanitation enterprises with 54% of top barriers identified falling into the financial barriers category. We further identified four groups of dominant perception that explain 47% of the variance among the sanitation enterprises: (1) Independent Sanitation Providers, (2) Small Business Reusers, (3) Big Business Treatment Providers, and (4) Public Provision Partners. The identification of these four groups indicates heterogeneity between sanitation enterprises that is not accounted for in policy. We also suggest that the underlying financial assumptions about the value proposition of the sanitation economy rarely hold, and that government support is required to sustain services in the majority of cases.