A/HRC/42/47/Add.2 tents or boats or shacks made of whatever materials that can be scavenged, but it also includes long-established informal communities consisting of durable housing of bricks and mortar (A/73/310/Rev.1, para. 7). In view of the specific features of water and sanitation services, the Special Rapporteur refers to those living in settlements and communities that are not within the purview of the Government due to a lack of legal recognition and are thus not provided with such services by public entities. For instance, longhouses on beaches are not recognized and registered as official residences by the state government and, hence, do not have access to the water provided by it. 45. Informal settlements are usually home to undocumented population, including persons who are stateless. In Sabah, the number of people affected by statelessness, those with an irregular status who are settled in villages by the coast or inland and those who are semi-nomadic are officially unknown. There is no publicly available data on the extent of statelessness in Sabah; however, it is recognized that the largest population of stateless persons, immigrants in irregular situations and those living in the streets in Malaysia are reportedly in that state and most are Bajau Laut, descendants of Indonesian and Filipino migrant workers. The Special Rapporteur was happy to hear that, in some states, such as Sabah, the Government had requested the water department to devise a solution to provide water and sanitation to the population living in informal settlements. He recommends that the Government implement feasible solutions for water and sanitation for the undocumented population so that they can enjoy their human rights to water and sanitation on the same terms as the documented population in Malaysia. 46. Those living in areas that are not recognized or registered as official residences do not benefit from formal water and sanitation services and must resort to informal provisions. In Sandakan, informal settlements are often in clandestine areas in which they remain undetected or are attached to factories or other economic enterprises in which people can work. In those areas, the population relied on self-provided water from rivers, water supplied from the factories or gravity-fed water from a nearby hill. In one village in Sandakan, the Special Rapporteur observed a complex water management system that involved the use of four different sources: a well, rainwater, a gravity-fed system and a river. The lack of a government presence in villages in which the undocumented population lives usually requires the villagers themselves to find their own solutions for water supply, which is sometimes costly, unsafe and lacking in availability. 47. In some coastal villages built on small adjacent islands, access to water is nonexistent, with some residents having to travel by boat to another village in order to collect water. Seeing the sparse distribution of villages on the small islands, along the coast, in the mountains and in remote rural areas, the Special Rapporteur acknowledges the challenges in identifying those groups and monitoring whether they, both Malaysian citizens and noncitizens, are provided with adequate access to water. At the same time, there were settlements that had been recognized as refugee camps but, nonetheless, their level of water access remained the same. The Special Rapporteur suggests that the Government establish a plan to upgrade such settlements through an integrated human rights-based approach, namely, by focusing on securing adequate housing, in all of its dimensions, as a response to structural conditions and societal dynamics that deprive residents of the human rights to water and sanitation (A/73/310/Rev.1, para. 14). 48. Residents in informal settlements often do not have access to water and sanitation because they cannot afford the charges; such access is often controlled by cartels. In one village in Sandakan, there are three informal water providers that have set up their own systems to supply mountain water, using self-installed checkpoints to control water quality. The informal providers play the role of monitoring water quality, not supplying water when it looks muddy or when the colour changes. The fee was 1 ringgit ($0.25) for 10 minutes supply of water that would feed up to three blue water tanks. By coincidence, the Special Rapporteur met the son of an informal provider, who at times managed turning the tap on and off and collecting the tariff. When the Rapporteur asked him about a theoretical situation in which people were too poor to pay for water, the boy immediately responded: “I give them water but don’t tell my father. Recently, a fisherman came on his boat with two buckets. I did not charge him.” Unlike this young boy who used different standards for those people who clearly could not afford to pay for the water, the Special Rapporteur notes 11