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Low-cost technologies often require a high level of user maintenancemuch higher than people in developed countries are accustomed to. This implies a high level of community organisation and participation. |
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1.3.2
UK ODA-funded Research. |
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Recent funding for technology development and research by the Engineering Division of the ODA has included studies of pit emptying technologies, on-site sanitation in low-income urban communities, urban surface-water drainage and reduced cost sewerage systems, as well as wastewater treatment processes. |
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Experience from 10 countries, including the USA and Australia, was considered in the reduced-cost sewerage study which lasted over a period of 6 years in two phases, during which time nine schemes were evaluated in Nigeria, Zambia, Pakistan and Brazil. The study recommended that reduced-cost sewerage should not be considered as a single sanitation concept, but as a series of measures which, when applied to the principles of conventional sewerage design and implementation, makes the final product more appropriate to low-income communities in developing countries (Reed, 1993a). |
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Three broad groups of low-cost systems were identified: simplified sewerage; condominial sewerage; and settled sewerage. Measures were recommended for operation and maintenance, and for overcoming institutional problems such as low connection rates and poor tariff collection. The report Guidelines for Reducing the Cost of Sewerage was produced, which included methods for capital cost reduction, sewer connection maximisation, system maintenance and system design optimization (Reed, 1993b). The results of many of the studies undertaken within the above research project can be found in the recent publication Sustainable Sewerage: Guidelines for Community Schemes (Reed, 1995). |
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The ODA-funded 1993 research report on reduced cost sewerage concluded that it is unlikely that any sewerage scheme can be reduced in cost to such an extent that it can be fully paid for by the urban poor, although it should be feasible to recover the costs of operation and maintenance (Reed, 1993a). Even the interim report of 1989 was able to quote 84 references from |
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