Wastewater treatment (part 2)

Activity : Waste treatment in your country

Timing: Allow 15 minutes

Follow the steps below to investigate the sanitation data (that is, the human waste and sewage disposal routes) for your country and discover the most prevalent method of sanitation.

  1. Go to the data page on the WHO/ UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene’s website [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] (JMP, n.d.).
  2. Change the top menu from ‘World’ to ‘Country’ and select your own country from the list. If you can’t find your own country, select a country that interests you.
  3. Select ‘View data table’, and choose ‘Sanitation’ as the measure and ‘Analyse by facility type’ as the ladder type. You will now see a table with different columns such as ‘Country’, ‘Residence type’ and ‘Year’.
  4. Find the largest ‘Coverage’ (this means the proportion of the population having access to this sanitation method).
  5. Is this coverage larger or smaller in urban areas compared to rural areas?

Discussion

This activity gives you practice at searching databases. The result you obtained depends on your particular setting, but in general coverage is often higher in urban than in rural settings.

When you’ve tried this activity you should return to Section 3.2 of the course.

Wastewater treatment (part 1)

Further examples of water surveillance