By Mohammad Fahim Sayeed
In the shadows of Bangladesh’s rising skyline, a less visible crisis festers—what happens after waste leaves the toilet.
For more than 65 million urban residents, access to safe, dignified sanitation remains a daily uncertainty. While significant strides have been made at the policy level, the gulf between ambition and action in faecal sludge management (FSM) is widening. At the heart of the issue lies a persistent problem: cities are building faster than they can sustain.
Over the past decade, investment in sanitation infrastructure has surged. Dozens of faecal sludge treatment plants have been constructed across the country, intended to replace dangerous, informal waste disposal with safe, regulated alternatives. But many of these facilities are underutilised, poorly maintained, or sit idle altogether. The hardware exists; the systems do not.
This disconnect is no accident. It reflects a widespread misconception that infrastructure alone can solve sanitation challenges. In reality, FSM success depends just as much on invisible elements: regulation, enforcement, human capacity, financing mechanisms, and behaviour change. These “soft systems,” often overlooked by large-scale development projects, are what determine whether an investment thrives or fails.
Across urban Bangladesh, the evidence is clear. Trucks collect sludge from households but have nowhere to discharge it safely. Operators lack formal training or certification. Municipalities, often strapped for resources, struggle to maintain facilities or monitor private service providers. And without clear incentives, the private sector remains hesitant to scale.
Sanitation entrepreneurs—some of whom have developed financially viable business models—face an uphill battle. In the absence of enabling regulation or access to finance, they are left to operate in grey zones, providing essential services without formal recognition. Their experience illustrates both the potential of the sanitation economy and the barriers that prevent it from flourishing.
The issue is not a lack of innovation, but rather fragmentation. FSM involves a constellation of actors—utilities, regulators, small businesses, NGOs, and financiers—each with a role to play but rarely moving in concert. Without integration, progress remains patchy and slow.
Meanwhile, investment flows remain skewed. Capital expenditure is favoured, while operation and maintenance, critical for sustainability, are underfunded or ignored. Development financing continues to prioritise construction over long-term service delivery, despite mounting evidence that this approach leads to wasteful outcomes.
What’s needed is a fundamental shift: from building infrastructure to building systems.
That means equipping municipal teams with the skills to manage FSM, developing monitoring frameworks that track performance, offering financial and policy incentives to private operators, and embedding behaviour change into every stage of service design. It also means pushing donors and financiers to reimagine what effective sanitation investment looks like—not a ribbon-cutting photo op, but a reliable, inclusive service that improves lives daily.
Achieving SDG 6.2—safe sanitation for all—will require more than new plants and pipelines. It will require sustained, systemic thinking and long-term commitment to governance, inclusion, and accountability.
Bangladesh is not alone in facing this challenge. But with the right investments—not just in infrastructure, but in the systems that support it—it has the potential to lead the way in demonstrating what truly sustainable FSM looks like.
The path forward is clear. The question now is whether decision-makers will choose to walk it.