Department Sanitation, Water and Solid Waste for Development

Sanitation has the potential to save lives; poorly implemented or managed sanitation does not. Reality has taught us that to safe-guard lives we must look beyond the toilet, considering the full sanitation chain: from the toilet via collection, transport, treatment to the safe disposal or reuse. The complexity of the issue, combined with the wide range of contexts and crisis settings remains a challenge to many organisations – an acknowledged gap in the sector. How can we all ensure a high quality of response with regard to sanitation?
This publication is an essential contribution to the sector – providing an excellent capacity building and decision support tool for sanitation solutions in humanitarian contexts. Thereby it helps to improve the coordination that we as a Cluster strive for, as good coordination can only take place if all actors in the field have the required tools and technical capacity, and speak the same technical language. By producing a humanitarian counterpart publication to the existing Compendium of Sanitation Systems and Technologies, widely used in the development sector, this document also contributes to the complementarity between the humanitarian and development WASH realms.
Together with the Global WASH Cluster partners and under the leadership of German WASH Network, Eawag and the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance, the creation of this publication has been an amazing collaborative effort with contributions from a multitude of international sector experts and organisations – striving to present the whole spectrum of sanitation technologies and systems, being as unbiased to single technical solutions as possible.
In a next step, the Global WASH Cluster is delighted to host the online version of this compendium together with the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance. We are grateful to the partners and donors, who have made this possible through their past and continuous support.