Judgment under uncertainty; a probabilistic evaluation framework for decision-making about sanitation systems in low-income countries

Abstract

for their great ideas, inputs and comments on this work. Working with Jules has indeed been a great pleasure for me, not only because he is an outstanding professor, but also because of the great person that he is. Double thanks to Francois for his confidence in me and for creating a great opportunity for my future experiences.I would also like to convey my sincere regards to Prof. Gertjan Medema who has always been a support for me in different stages of my master studies. Many regards to Eng. Amir Hajizadeh, my first and forever manager, who gave me the initial drive to pursue my studies in TU Delft.Loads and loads of appreciation to my mother and to my sweet little family in Delft: Wikke Novalia, Ravina Rukmina Binol, David Ginting and Anthonie Hogendoorn, and all my awesome friends from all over the world who created the most enjoyable moments of my life in the Netherlands. 2 SummarySanitation, as described by the World Health Organization (WHO), refers to the provisions of facilities and services for the safe disposal of human urine and faeces.On the outset of the 21 st century, inaccessibility of 40% of the world's inhabitants to sanitation facilities sounds like an international shock. This literally means that 2.6 billion people in the world still rely on a bucket, a bush or a backstreet for excretion.As an inheritance of the colonial period, for years emphasis was made on copying the western sanitary achievements by trying to provide sewerage coverage in developing countries. It was revealed later that the required investments in conventional sewerage systems exceed the allocated financial resources in many of the low-income countries and these sanitation options are not likely to reach the huge poor populations in those regions.Facing the failure of conventional solutions in many cases, alternative solutions (e.g. small-scale systems) were proposed for developing countries, but did not remain protected from criticisms either.Among all available sanitation options, decision makers and planners in developing regions of low-income countries have to encounter the dilemma of which path to choose. Low-income countries, due to their vast socio-economic inhomogeneity, are more complex target locations for selection of appropriate sanitation options. The dynamic situation in these regions with the rapidly growing populations (especially in the urban settings) and the changing socio-economic structures make decision-making a more fragile process. Technically, all options that are required to deal with the global sanitation crisis seem to have been developed already. However, the challenge remains in selection and implementation of the appropriate technologies in a way that the desirable outcomes would be resulted. Some decision-making support tools have been developed so far to address this problem by assisting the decision makers in their challenging task; an attempt that may be described as: The low-sighted leading the clueless, with a map that keeps changing.In the existing sanitation decision-making support ...

Constructing the ecological sanitation: a review on technology and methods

“…Evaluation of the Eco-San systems is necessary since it has many important functions in promoting the R&Ds and applications. It can help to select the suitable Eco-San system among many different styles according to the study area and situation (Malekpour et al, 2013), to compare advantages and disadvantages of the ecological and conventional sanitation systems (Thibodeau et al, 2014), and to improve existing technology or to develop novel sanitation system (Iglesias et al, 2012).…”

“…In terms of wastewater sources, some studies focused on urine application (Guzha et al, 2005), urine treatment (Wilsenach et al, 2007), composting of feces (Magri et al, 2013), and co-composting of feces and kitchen waste (Niwagaba et al, 2009c); in terms of performances, some studies focused on economic feasibility (von Munch and Mayumbelo, 2007), technical feasibility (Lehtoranta et al, 2014), and environmental or social impacts (Lehtoranta et al, 2014;Malekpour et al, 2013). In terms of treatment process, previous studies mainly stressed different styles of toilet (Anand and Apul, 2014), the source-separation collection of the domestic wastewater (Bdour et al, 2009), the treatment technologies of different wastewater (black water, yellow water, brown water and gray water) (Mo and Zhang, 2013), and the acceptability of society, human and managers.…”

Anaerobic Sewage Treatment in Latin America

“…Proper sanitation is a function of mass flow per area per time unit, in which socio-economic factors determine the pallet of sanitation solutions (Letema et al 2014). Sanitation option criteria will finally determine which solution is most adequate at a specific location (Malekpour et al 2013). Although the coverage by sewer systems is steadily increasing, the population growth in Latin America and the Caribbean has surpassed the capacity of national and local governments in order to meet the demand for water supply and sewerage (Noyola et al 2012).…”

Analyzing Sanitation Sustainability Assessment Frameworks for Resource-Limited Communities

“…Frameworks that use: qualitative methods typically discuss each indicator separately to valuate one sanitation system; [35][36][37][38] semi-quantitative methods typically evaluate whether a sanitation system's impacts were better, 59 equal to, or worse than a baseline; 33,39,40 and quantitative methods typically employ multi-criteria 60 decision analysis (MCDA) to aggregate quantitative data into a single-score per sanitation 61 system. [41][42][43][44][45] In addition, there are different frameworks for different project phases. Monitoring-62 based frameworks are intended to qualitatively evaluate and discuss impacts and tradeoffs within 63 a single system 35,[46][47][48] or track an existing system's change over time.…”