I remember walking into the offices of Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (DWASA) along with my colleagues at Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) nearly eight years ago to discuss a new business idea. By then, WSUP had already been working with DWASA and the City Corporation to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene in some of the poorest communities in the city. It was time to take this a step further.

As you see, the vast majority of urban residents in Bangladesh rely on sanitation which is not connected to a sewer. In fact, only 20 percent of Dhaka’s population, mainly in high-income areas, is connected. Instead, residents rely on pit latrines or septic tanks, which need to be emptied and the waste taken to a treatment plant.

However, a safe, affordable service is not available for most residents. They resort to manual pit-emptiers, or ‘sweepers’, to collect the waste which is then usually dumped in open drains or rivers, posing a great threat to people’s health and the surrounding environment.

The lack of clarity around whose responsibility it was to provide sanitation waste collection services in the city greatly hindered progress in this area. And high up-front capital costs prevented private sector engagement in this market.

So, our idea was SWEEP, a service that would bring together a range of stakeholders who could complement each other in delivering a new sanitation waste collection service.

After three years of negotiations, we finally launched, and DWASA signed a lease agreement with one SME. The contract allowed the entrepreneur to lease two vacuum tankers, which DWASA owned but didn’t use. This lowered the barriers to entry, enabling the entrepreneur to provide an emptying service at a minimal start-up cost.

Whilst we tested SWEEP, WSUP was also one of several organisations which helped draft the Faecal Sludge Management (FSM) Institutional Regulatory Framework in Bangladesh. The framework passed into law in May 2017, a crucial step in assigning responsibilities to different public sector institutions. It has been instrumental in driving interest from the public sector in the SWEEP model.

The next milestone for WSUP was the Skoll Foundation’s decision to invest in the SWEEP scale-up, building on piloting work which had been supported by funders including the UK government, the Stone Family Foundation, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Fast forward to 2022, and the model is now operational in the cities of Dhaka, Chattogram, and Rangpur as well as five other municipalities. Some 13 enterprises are part of SWEEP, serving more than 2.6 million residents. It is the country’s first financially viable sanitation waste collection service which reaches the poorest households. We aim to reach 15 million by 2030.

Read the full article about water and sanitation by Habibur Rahman at Skoll Foundation.