IWRA Proceedings

The main goal of this study is improve Municipal Sanitation Plans (MSP) in Brazil. In order to achieve this goal, plans will be analyzed in order to identify best practices and do recommendations about how to prepare sanitation plans in a manner that supports successful implementation. The Sanitation Act establishes the national guidelines for sanitation in Brazil it was enacted to modernize sanitation regulation, giving support and new institutional features to cities, counties and States, aiming to improve the sanitation services in Brazil. The MSP can be a way to improve the urban development since MSP is an important instrument of planning. On the one hand MSP is an important tool for urban development in Brazil, however in writing and implementing the plans is a challenge for a number of reasons. One reason most Brazilian cities are inexperienced in planning sanitation, and the cities have had problems in writing plans.  Another reason is that, usually, the City Administration does not have enough human resources to work on the sanitation daily and routine sanitation activities. Thus, the cities tend to hire a consulting company or a service provider to write the MSP, which can be expensive and sometimes the City Administration remains indifferent to, or has little access to, the plan during the process of writing. As consequence of the aforementioned problems, weak plans have been written and implemented. Even though some problems have been identified in the analysis of plans, important gaps still remain in the identification of the problems specifically in the MSP from Paraná State. 

The research tool adopted as methodology tool was a check list.  The check list covers all aspects of Municipal Plan, and follows recommendations founded about Plans in literature about Plans. The categories analyzed are: Universal Access (UA), Equity, Policy/Sectorial, Document “Municipal Policy of Sanitation”, Management Capacity, Drinking Water (DW), Sewage, Urban Drainage, and Urban Waste Management.

The conclusion is the MSPs vary in quality and comprehensiveness. While each MSP has positive features, none completely meet the legal requirements. All categories had problems and recommendations for your improvement. Of particular concern basic categories are not completely covered including i.e. UA, Equity, and DW. For Equity, the main problem is the concept does not appear in any part of the MSP. A recommendation to solve it is to present social characteristics of the population without access to services to priory investments, as a way to know and priories equity programs and projects. At UA, the concept just stated as purpose, but no incorporated throughout the plan. Provide detailed information to identify who still does not have access to the services and how to achieve universal access is a recommendation. At Drinking Water no data about possible causes of disability, so it is necessary investigate these problems and make available on MSP. On Policy/Sectorial category, it is recommended consider gender, race, and poverty on MSP. Also, always link and includes watershed plans and Democratic Participation tools in sanitation planning process.