Increasing Functional Sustainability of Water and Sanitation Supplies in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa

Lack of universal access to water and sanitation results in well over a million preventable deaths each year, and in both the water and sanitation sectors, there is critical need for greater sustainability. Objectives of this perspective paper are to distill the foundational components of sustainability in water and sanitation, to analyze the main barriers toward establishing these components, and to suggest feasible solutions for overcoming barriers within the context of rural Sub-Saharan Africa. To identify these key components, we extracted the necessary and universal sustainability factors for rural water and sanitation supplies from existing literature. We identify these components as (1) effective community demand, (2) local financing and cost recovery, and (3) dynamic operation and maintenance. We briefly illustrate with examples from the field how the presence of these components leads to long-term functioning water and sanitation supplies, while lack of these components undermines sustainability. Dynamic operation and maintenance is especially critical, and has largely been overlooked by providers, operators, and managers of water and sanitation supplies. We encourage the research community of engineers and scientists and field practitioners to use these three components as a basis for rigorous inquiry into sustainability of water and sanitation supplies. Ultimately, improving sustainability of water and sanitation supplies will result in salient and lasting gains in health and economic development throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.