Brazil’s new urban water and sanitation services

The condominial approach to the construction of water and sewerage networks was developed in Brazil during the 1980s as a response to the challenges posed by expanding services into neighbourhoods on the urban periphery. Using this method, water and sewerage services are not provided to each housing unit but to blocks of dwellings grouped into a unit known as a condominium.

Areport from the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Programme (WSP) describes how Brazil has provided condominial networks to 2.5 million urban residents. Underthe condominial system public networks do not need torun through every plot of land or to be present in every street but merely toprovide a single connection point to each city block. Therefore, the requiredlength of the network is much shorter than that of a conventional system,needing about half the length for sewerage and about a quarter of the pipingrequired for conventional water services. The approach allows supply ofdrinking water and sewerage treatment facilities to be decentralised, avoidingthe costs associated with transporting fluids over long distances.

Thecondominial method helps to develop a closerrelationship between service providers and users, encouraging them to worktogether to expand services more easily and adapt to local needs andconstraints. The condominium becomes not only a physical unit of serviceprovision, but a social unit for making collective decisions and organisingcommunal actions.

Theauthor describes successes of the condominial model indifferent urban contexts:

• In Brasilia, sewerage cover has been extended to half a millionpeople, achieving universal access at very low cost to the utility company.
• In Salvador, the capital of Bahia state, what began as anexperiment has now delivered sewerage services to a million people in denselypopulated and steeply inclined slums.
• In Parauapebas, a small mining town in northernBrazil, extensive construction support frombeneficiary communities has provided water connections at a fraction of thecost of conventional delivery systems.
• Social mobilisation has worked well: at condominium level, residents havenot found it difficult to reach consensus about system design issues.

In Brasilia theutility company formally adopted the condominialmodel, communicated policies clearly and provided residents with clearlydefined system designs. However, in Salvador, the utility has been less committed. There havebeen problems convincing local residents to assume maintenanceresponsibilities. The number of people connecting to the sewerage network hasbeen less than expected, undermining the original rationale for the programme.

WSPsuggests that the key lessons from the Brazilian example are that:

• Community mobilisation must not just encourage people to get connected,but also include messages about the need for regular operation and maintenance.
• User fees must be fair so that users can benefit from any cost savingsassociated with the choices they make.
• Tariffs should be flexible: those whose land is crossed by pipes, or whodo more than their fair share of maintenance, should pay less.
• Coherent strategies and choices of technology for network expansion mustbe clearly communicated to the public.
• Community maintenance is easier if pipes can be routed along pavements.