Economic Assessment of Sanitation Interventions in Vietnam - WSP

ForewordTarget 10 of the Millennium Development Goals recognizesaccess to safe sanitation as a key aspect of human development:“to reduce by half between 1990 and 2015 the proportionof people without access to improved sanitation.”This reflects the fact that access to improved sanitation is abasic need: at home, in the workplace and at school, peopleappreciate and value a clean, safe, private and convenientplace in which to urinate and defecate. Good sanitationalso contributes importantly to achieving other developmentgoals related to child mortality reduction, school enrolment,nutritional status, gender equality, clean drinkingwater, environmental sustainability and the quality of lifeof slum dwellers.Despite recognition of its importance, sanitation continuesto lose ground to other development targets in termsof priority setting by governments, households, the privatesector and donors. This fact is hardly surprising given thatsanitation remains a largely taboo subject, neither is it an‘attractive’ subject for the media or politicians to promoteas a worthy cause. Furthermore, limited data exist on itstangible development benefits for decision makers to justifymaking sanitation a priority in government or privatespending plans.Based on this premise, the World Bank’s Water and SanitationProgram (WSP) is leading the ‘Economics of SanitationInitiative’ (ESI) to compile existing evidence and togenerate new evidence on socio-economic aspects of sanitation.The aim of ESI is to assist decision-makers at differentlevels to make informed choices on sanitation policies andresource allocations.Phase 1 of ESI in 2007-8 conducted and published a ‘sanitationimpact’ study, which estimated the economic andsocial impacts of unimproved sanitation on the populationsand economies of Vietnam and other countries of SoutheastAsia. This study showed that the economic impacts ofwww.wsp.orgpoor sanitation are US$780 million per year for Vietnam,or US$9.8 per capita. This is equivalent to 1.3% of annualGDP in 2005 prices. These and other results were disseminatedwidely to national policy makers, sector partners, anddecentralized levels of Vietnam.The current volume reports the second major activity ofESI, which examines in greater depth the costs and benefitsof specific sanitation interventions in a range of fieldsettings in Vietnam. Its purpose is to provide informationto decision makers on the impact of their decisions relatingto sanitation – to understand the costs and benefitsof improved sanitation in selected rural and urban locations,and to enable a better understanding of the overallnational level impacts of improving sanitation coveragein Vietnam. On the cost side, decision makers and stakeholdersneed to understand more about the timing andsize of costs of sanitation interventions (e.g. investment,operation and maintenance), as well as financial versusnon-financial costs, in order to make appropriate investmentdecisions that increase intervention effectivenessand sustainability. On the benefit side, both financial andsocio-economic impacts need to be more fully understoodwhen advocating for improved sanitation and when makingthe optimal sanitation choice. For cost-benefit estimations,a sample of sites representing the different contextsof Vietnam was selected to assess the efficiency of sanitationinterventions, and thus illustrate the range and sizesof sanitation costs and benefits.The research under this regional program is being conductednot only in Vietnam, but also in Cambodia, China(Yunnan Province), Indonesia, Lao PDR and the Philippines.Similar studies are also ongoing in selected SouthAsian and African countries. While WSP has supported thedevelopment of this study, it is an ‘initiative’ in the broadestsense, which includes the active contribution of manypeople and institutions (see Acknowledgments).xv