A/HRC/39/55 urban settings.27 Most of them live in urban informal settlements, and hence may have no access to piped water or sanitation; some are even forced to use unsafe water and unimproved sanitation solutions. Because of the types of shelter and locations in which they live, some have to rely on expensive water and sanitation provided by informal service providers; for instance, in 2014, in the northern region of Jordan, refugees living outside camps struggled to secure basic living standards in shelters with damaged latrines and leaking sewage pipes, or in informal tented settlements without any latrines at all. They tended to spend a substantial portion of their meagre income on water because they were either not connected to the water network or had only a small water storage capacity in their home. One family of refugees living in a hut outside a refugee camp informed the previous mandate holder that, although the land owner gave them water for drinking and cooking, they had to use unsafe canal water for washing and cleaning (A/HRC/27/55/Add.2, para. 56). 31. Providing assistance to forcibly displaced persons living outside organized camps can be daunting, given that they are often dispersed or hidden in host communities, and therefore harder to reach. Support for access to water and sanitation services can be provided through cash programmes, the upgrading of facilities at the household or communal infrastructure level, or by helping municipality utilities to improve and extend services. Those who require assistance most often do not have access to these services because of the lack of physical accessibility or information on the assistance they could receive, particularly in the case of older persons, persons with disabilities or single parents with many children. Identifying needs of individual level within a household is an even greater challenge owing to the absence of intra-household data; for example, menstrual hygiene management specifically targeting adolescent girls living in a household poses a challenge that has not yet been properly addressed in terms of the development of guidelines or plans of action and implementation by actors involved in such situations. C. Progressive realization 32. Once the emergency phase is over and the situation has been stabilized by means of humanitarian assistance, the quality of water and sanitation services are expected to improve gradually. Given that, according to the Sphere standards, the WASH minimum standards “contribute to the progressive realization” of the rights to water and sanitation, it seems that the notion of progressive realization of those human rights is widely accepted by humanitarian actors. 33. The progressive realization of the right to water and sanitation in the human rights framework does not simply mean a gradual improvement in and expansion of service levels; it also requires taking deliberate, concrete and targeted steps to the maximum extent of resources available.28 It also requires planning at the outset of an emergency and the implementation of affirmative actions for disadvantaged groups to raise their level of access to that of the rest of the community. 34. In actual fact, the degree of access does not always improve and can, in some cases, even deteriorate, owing to a decline in political attention, inadequate funding, lack of planning or inadequate support for service providers in assuring the operational continuity of essential services. Wastewater management, for instance, is all too often not considered in the initial planning at the outset of an emergency, for a variety of reasons, not least because it requires significant amounts of upfront financial resources. A sharp increase in wastewater generation inside or outside camps can put stress on an existing system and may require the construction of new wastewater collection and treatment infrastructure, or the upgrading of the existing one, to serve forcibly displaced persons and host communities alike while safeguarding the environment. 27 28 World Bank and UNHCR, Vulnerability of internally displaced persons in urban settings, World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2015. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 15 (2002) on the right to water, para. 17. 9