Financial and institutional challenges to make faecal sludge management integrated part of ecoscan approach in West Africa : case study of Kumasi, Ghana

The debate on sanitation services provision in Africa should go beyond technologies andfocus more on appropriate financial and institutional arrangements to reach systems'sustainability irrespective of donors' financial supports.The aim of this study is to adapt the Faecal Sludge Management (FSM) in West Africancontext to the ecological sanitation (ecosan) concept. Kumasi, a city in Ghana located 300km Northwest of Accra the capital city, is used as a case study. In Kumasi where FSM issues are institutionally better tackled than in many other townsin West-Africa, the system sustainability is still a problem because of the highgovernment subsidy through donors' support. Improved financial and institutionalarrangements need to be found for an economical and ecological sustainability of thesystem in accordance with ecosan approach.The approach used for the research is based on literature review and direct contact withrelevant stakeholders in Kumasi through open discussion, key informants interviews,interviews in which structured questionnaires were used, and field observation. Staffs forfour collection companies and 20 households were interviewed.A new concept developed in the research which is the ISFSM (Integrated SustainableFaecal Sludge Management) concept, has been used as a framework to propose a newfinancial mechanism for sustainable faecal sludge management for the city. The ISFSMdeveloped is based on IWRM (Integrated Water Resources Management) and ISWM(Integrated Sustainable Waste Management) concepts, and is a concept which placesFaecal Sludge Management (FSM) under the umbrella of ecosan. The principles of thisconcept are equity, efficiency, ecological integrity, public participation and interactionwith other urban service. From these principles I derived the CTP-approach (whichimplies that the service beneficiaries have to pay the service they receive at the right costbut at a fee that they are capable to pay) which also implies a cross-subsidy, and WTPapproach(which implies that the tariff of a product should be set at the amount that theclients are willing to pay), which are the main tools used, together with the cost recovery(CR) tool, to analyze the financial situation for the FSM system.Based on the ISFSM concept, the research shows how the FSM system of the city, can beindependent from donors financial support if the potential revenue in both householdsand farmers are brought out. This revenue was estimated: (i) for households based on anthe CTP assumption of 05% of his or her income that a person can spend on the toiletemptying service, and (ii) for compost sale to farmers based on a tariff of US{dollar} 1.4 per 50kg bag of compost determined from the farmers' WTP results. It has been found that theFSM system financial cost recovery can reach 167% from this estimated revenue. Thispotential revenue includes US{dollar} 109,200 per month from households which represents34% (current estimated FS collection coverage) of the total revenue that can be expectedfrom all the households in the city, and US{dollar} 18,000 per month from farmers. Asensitivity analysis showed that only 55% to 70% of the households CTP is needed toachieve the reasonable cost recovery of 100%. This theoretical approach still has somepractical limitations which are addressed in this thesis. This approach can then be appliedto other West African cities to overcome sanitation problems in a sustainable manner. It is also concluded that the FSM is currently not integrated and sustainable in Kumasi.The institutional and financial challenges that are required to make the FSM integratedand sustainable were found to be: (i) reach efficiency and equity for the system costrecovery by applying the CTP and WTP approaches; (ii) reach the ecological integrity(closing nutrients loop) by adding a composting step to the current FSTP for compostproduction for reuse in agriculture to ensure that nutrients are returned back to theenvironment; (iii) public participation by considering the stakeholders' view, allowingtransparency and accountability mechanism to inform the public on the importance ofFSM service and on why they should pay a CTP-based fee to benefit for the sanitationservice; (iv) interaction with the solid waste allowing the association with solid wastemanagement service for co-composting (composting of both faecal and solid waste) toenhance the compost quality