Sustainable WASH Solutions

Unsafe sanitation threatens public health, ecosystems, and drinking-water sources. Failures across containment, collection, transport, or treatment amplify contamination risks—especially in dense, high-risk, or climate-vulnerable settlements. Addressing these challenges requires a planning approach that is contextual, integrated, climate-smart, and equitable, ensuring that solutions respond to local terrain, risks, service gaps, and the needs of marginalised communities.

Citywide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) offers a transformative pathway for addressing these complexities. In this landscape, Innpact’s Geospatial CWIS Planning Tool has emerged as a leading innovation, enabling cities to translate complex sanitation realities into actionable, investment-ready solutions.

A Unified, Data-Agnostic & Scalable CWIS Framework

Innpact’s Geospatial CWIS Planning Tool—applied in 49+ cities across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa—provides a structured, evidence-based method for diagnosing gaps, identifying beneficiaries, and prioritising interventions. The framework uses openly available digital datasets (Google Open Buildings, Microsoft Bing Buildings, OSM, satellite sources) blended with field validation, making it data-agnostic and suitable even where data is limited.

Its six-module structure spans system suitability, safe containment, collection and transport (C&T) planning, greywater management, resource optimisation, and enabling-environment reforms. Together, these modules support rapid feasibility assessments, granular targeting of underserved communities, and clear pathways for city-level investments and implementation.

What Sets This Framework Apart

• High-resolution, contextual intelligence
  Captures settlement typologies, watershed dynamics, climate exposures, hard-to-reach zones, and bulk generators at building level.
• End-to-end sanitation planning
  Supports the full chain—from diagnosis and beneficiary mapping to intervention design, costing, and phasing across containment → C&T → treatment → greywater → public toilets.
• Investment and regulatory clarity
  Provides project packaging, financial estimates, and reform measures required to operationalise CWIS strategies.
• Recognised internationally
  Used in assignments with the World Bank, ADB, AIIB, the Gates Foundation and national and state governments, and now being published as a dedicated IWA book.
• Validated through real city applications
  Cities such as Sherpur, Dhanbad, Ramgarh, Raghogarh, Sanchi, and Khajuraho have used this tool to delineate sewered and non-sewered (SS/NSS) zones, define desludging systems, optimise greywater solutions, map emptying zones, and upgrade public toilet networks with clear CAPEX/OPEX pathways.

This unified approach makes the tool a scalable, repeatable, and implementation-ready decision-support system suitable for diverse urban and peri-urban geographies.

Why Cities Prefer the Innpact CWIS Approach

1. Contextual yet scalable
   Adapts seamlessly to dense urban cores, peri-urban expansions, and climate-vulnerable terrains.
2. Works with openly available spatial datasets
   Reduces reliance on costly surveys and accelerates planning timelines.
3. Delivers complete WASH decision support
   Enables streamlined progression from diagnosis → beneficiary targeting → intervention design → costing → implementation phasing.
4. Integrates vulnerability dimensions
   Brings climate, social, economic, and environmental sensitivity into planning—ensuring priority for high-risk and underserved communities.
5. Supports transparent, evidence-based investments
   Essential for donor-supported programmes and government planning processes.