Risk-based sequential allocation of competing sanitation infrastructure investments

Abstract

Given severe sanitation service shortages, infrastructure interdependencies and extreme scarcity of funding that prevail in many developing countries, the allocation of funds across the three services of providing drinking water, wastewater and sewage and solid waste is vital to their sustained expansion. This paper adopts an approach to resource allocation for the three services based on the triplet of questions found in risk management regarding what options are available, their associated trade-offs, and their impacts on future options. An example shows an application to a multistage sequential allocation of investments to sanitation infrastructure representative of a scenario in developing countries.