A/HRC/30/39 2. Communities in informal settlements 42. Residents of informal settlements often do not enjoy formal service provision, receiving their services from a range of different, often informal and/or small-scale providers or through self-supply. For water services, this can include water kiosks, water vendors that come to a user’s home, as well as piped water delivered to the household. For sanitation, there is an even larger range of types of service, from no service at all through substandard pit latrines (seldom emptied and often overflowing) to shared or communitylevel toilets, to connections to a rudimentary sewage system, where wastes are not treated, to small-scale sewage systems with adequate treatment plants. Given this range of services that exists outside the formal system, any pricing, subsidy or tariff system can seem irrelevant to an often substantial part of the population. In many cities, tariff structures, subsidy systems or other special measures are only accessible for households with a formal address or to a registered household or individual. 3. Communities relying on self-supply 43. Local governments often lack the capacity to support sustainable access to water and sanitation services, in particular in rural areas. As a result, donors and local governments have often turned to promoting community management approaches. Unfortunately, there continues to be a high rate of failure under community management. One study estimated that an average of 30 per cent of rural hand pumps in sub-Saharan Africa are not working, with the figure rising to as high as 65 per cent in some countries.25 Explanations for these situations include a lack of local technical skills, management capacity, spare parts, or funds to pay for the necessary repairs. Further, as people are understandably unwilling to pay for services that are unreliable, there is inadequate funding for repairs. Institutional reform, developing communities’ capacity, and increased financial and human resources are therefore required to realize the human rights to water and sanitation in rural areas. 26 44. On the other hand, significant inroads have been made through Community-Led Total Sanitation in expanding access to sanitation. Recognizing that improving sanitation relies to a large extent on practicing safe and hygienic sanitation, the approach focuses on mobilizing communities to analyse and improve the situation with regard to open defecation.27 Community-Led Total Sanitation is in principle opposed to the provision of subsidies based on the premise that subsidized sanitation often does not align with people’s preferences and that such solutions have often been unsustainable by creating a culture of dependency.28 45. The approach, or its implementation in particular cases, has encountered some criticism from the perspective of human rights, 29 including concerns about the affordability of adequate sanitation for the most disadvantaged due to the lack of subsidies. Without external support, people living in extreme poverty may only be able to build very basic 25 26 27 28 29 12 Tom Slaymaker and Catarina Fonseca, “Framing paper JMP post-2015 Working Group on Water” (2012), available from http://www.wssinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/resources/post-2015-WaterWorking-Group-Framing-Paper-v3.pdf. See Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development/Development Co-operation Directorate Secretariat and World Water Council, Donor profiles on aid to water supply (2008), available from http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/41752319.pdf. See Kamal Kar and Robert Chambers, Handbook on Community-Led Total Sanitation, (Plan UK and Institute of Development Studies, London and Brighton, 2008), p. 7. Ibid, p. 8. See Jamie Bartram and others, “Commentary on the Human Right to Sanitation: Should the Right to Community-wide Health be won at the Cost of Individual Rights?” Journal of Water and Health, vol. 10, No. 4 (2012), pp. 499-503.