Parternships for urban development

The needs of ever-increasing urban populations are stretching or exceeding the capacity of municipal authorities, especially in less developed cities. Housing, infrastructure development, and utility services are inadequate and governments either do not have the resources or the capacity or the political will to improve the situation. Based on the assumption that competition ensures greater efficiency and transparency, many "experts" have proposed privatisation as a solution. Critics have argued, however, that privatisation fails to address the needs of the poor.

With governments being inefficient and markets not always providing for the poor, there is an increasing emphasis on public-private partnerships for managing cities. Two such partnerships in waste management and supply of water have enabled Dhaka residents -- rich and poor -- to improve their quality of life while the sharing of resources has resulted in a win-win situation for all concerned.

Waste management
Dhaka city is experiencing particularly serious difficulties in dealing -- or failing to deal -- with ever increasing waste generation. With a population of over 14 million, the city's cash-strapped municipal government simply does not have the capacity to cope with over 4000 tons of garbage produced daily. Hence, considerable amount of waste is left uncollected and the remainder dumped in landfills.

Waste Concern, a non-profit organisation founded by two social entrepreneurs, saw the potential for composting household organic waste into a resource, i.e. organic fertilizer. They successfully initiated a community-based composting pilot project on land allotted by Mirpur (North) Lions Club. For the model to spread, however, Waste Concern had to find a different land source since leasing at market prices would make the project unfeasible. They identified significant amounts of unutilised public land and persuaded the Municipal Corporation and the Public Works Department to be partners by providing access to some of these lands.

The last piece in the puzzle involved marketing the end product -- the bio-fertilizer. After contacting different fertilizer companies and conducting quality assurance tests, Waste Concern now has agreements for the supply of compost; and the market demand far exceeds their entire annual production.

Waste Concern also developed a system for managing waste in urban slums. As slum residents generally have no legal tenure, utility service rules bar them from receiving services. They modified a Sri Lankan barrel composting technique that took into account space constraints of settlements along with creating income opportunities. Four to six households share a barrel to compost their kitchen waste and Waste Concern purchases the end product from them.

Access to water
A large number of poor urban residents in Dhaka city live in overcrowded squatter settlements on either public or private land, with little or no basic services and utilities. As most low-income residents do not have the right of tenure on the land, they have been left out of the planning and allocation of government utility services. This forces the poor to look for "illegal" alternatives resulting in them spending far higher per unit cost for similar services than the rich.

Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK), a not-for-profit organisation, was initiated by a group of doctors and social activists to work on primary heath care in slums of Dhaka. They learned from residents that access to safe drinking water was key to improving the health situation. Thus, they initially worked with hand water pumps, but had to soon abandon this idea as ground water levels were too low.

DSK then approached the Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (DWASA), a statutory body responsible for water supply and sewer drainage of the city, for a piped water connection. DWASA rules at the time dictated, however, that services could be extended only to people or organisations having legal tenure to premises. As the poor pay above government rates for unofficial water supply, DSK persisted with DWASA regarding the economic viability of providing legal water connections to slum communities. They also offered to act as a guarantor for the security deposit and payment of bills. Finally, DWASA agreed to make an exception.

DSK then organized slums residents to form a water supply management committee. Under this arrangement, DSK mediated with DWASA and facilitated legal access to water supply and sanitation and provided capacity building for the community to manage the program. The community was responsible for collecting fees, paying bills, appointing caretakers, providing minor repairs and maintenance and repaying investment cost to DSK. The pilot phase was a success and DSKs own work has since expanded along with being replicated by other NGOs in different parts of the city.

The above initiatives demonstrate how different stakeholders can pool resources to bring about efficient and self-sustaining systems for healthier cities while reducing dependency on donor funding. In Dhaka city alone, where the urban poor number at least 6 million, it is approximated that only 55 percent, 20 percent, and 22 percent of them have access to safe water supply, sanitation facility and municipal waste collection services respectively. When we contrast this with another figure that estimates around 75 percent of contribution to GDP coming from non-agriculture, mainly from the urban sector, the need for healthier cities takes on an even greater sense of urgency. While the initiatives of Waste Concern and DSK have brought about a change in mind set regarding the utilization and access to public services, the challenge that now remains is the scaling of such operations to go beyond limited interventions to covering entire cities.

Safi Khan is a development activist.