Advanced Faecal Sludge Management Planning Training Course

Course overview

Municipalities, utilities, humanitarian agencies and sanitation service providers often have partial information on containment, emptying, transport, treatment and end use, yet must make investment decisions that affect public health, flood risk, worker safety and operating budgets. Advanced faecal sludge management (FSM) planning requires more than selecting a treatment technology: planners must quantify sludge flows, identify service-chain losses, assess institutional responsibilities, model demand, select viable service areas and prepare phased, financeable interventions. This course addresses the practical challenge of turning fragmented field evidence into an implementable citywide or settlement-level FSM plan.

Participants learn to diagnose the full sanitation service chain using Shit Flow Diagram (SFD) methods, faecal waste flow calculations, service-area mapping and sanitation safety planning. They develop demand estimates for desludging, analyse containment performance and emptying constraints, compare transport logistics, size treatment and co-treatment options, and evaluate reuse pathways. The course also covers capital and operating cost estimation, tariff and subsidy design, institutional and regulatory arrangements, procurement packaging, risk management and performance monitoring.

Instruction combines expert-led technical sessions with a running city case. Participants work with sample household survey data, truck records, treatment plant assumptions and GIS layers to prepare an FSM planning dossier. The final deliverable is a defensible implementation package containing a service-chain diagnosis, demand and capacity calculations, prioritised investment options, an institutional action matrix, a financing approach, and a monitoring framework that can be adapted to their own programme or municipality.

The course is suited to professionals who already work with urban sanitation, wastewater, public health, municipal infrastructure or humanitarian WASH systems and now need to lead, review or procure advanced FSM planning work.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Construct an SFD-based sanitation service-chain diagnosis using containment, emptying, transport, treatment and disposal data
• Calculate faecal sludge generation, desludging demand and peak collection requirements from population and containment assumptions
• Map priority service areas in QGIS using settlement density, access constraints, flood exposure and sanitation coverage layers
• Compare scheduled desludging, on-demand emptying and transfer-station models using operational and financial criteria
• Size faecal sludge treatment, co-treatment and resource-recovery options from projected hydraulic and solids loads
• Prepare lifecycle cost estimates, tariff scenarios and targeted subsidy models for an FSM service
• Develop an institutional responsibility matrix covering regulation, service delivery, treatment operations and enforcement
• Produce a phased FSM implementation plan with investment priorities, procurement packages, risks and performance indicators

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Municipal Sanitation Managers — who must turn sanitation policy and incomplete service data into investable FSM programmes
• WASH Programme Managers — who design or oversee urban and peri-urban sanitation interventions for development or humanitarian portfolios
• Utility and Wastewater Planning Engineers — who assess co-treatment, treatment capacity and operational interfaces with sewered systems
• Public Health and Environmental Health Officers — who need to reduce exposure pathways from unsafe containment and sludge handling
• Sanitation Consultants and Infrastructure Advisors — who prepare feasibility studies, city sanitation plans and donor-funded investment proposals
• NGO and Humanitarian WASH Coordinators — who need scalable sludge-service models for dense settlements, camps and host communities

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have working experience in urban sanitation, wastewater, public health engineering, municipal service delivery or WASH programming. The course assumes familiarity with basic sanitation technologies, including pits, septic tanks, vacuum trucks and treatment processes, as well as confidence interpreting tables, maps and simple cost calculations. Prior exposure to city sanitation planning, household survey data or Excel is helpful. Participants should bring a laptop capable of running Microsoft Excel and QGIS; template files are provided. Advanced hydraulic design, specialist GIS expertise, laboratory analysis and prior use of SFD tools are not required.

Training methodology

The five-day programme uses instructor-led technical briefings, worked calculations and a continuous municipal FSM case. Participants analyse household sanitation data, desludging records, treatment assumptions and spatial layers in guided Excel and QGIS exercises. Small groups test alternative collection, transfer, treatment and financing scenarios, then defend their recommendations against operational, public-health and affordability constraints. Facilitated peer review is used to refine each group’s planning dossier. The final session converts the case findings into a time-bound application plan for the participant’s own city, utility or WASH programme.

Course outline

Day 1: Service-chain diagnosis and evidence base

• Citywide inclusive sanitation and the FSM service-chain framework
• Containment typologies and failure modes for pits and septic tanks
• SFD Promotion Initiative methodology and data-quality requirements
• Faecal waste flow calculations for contained, emptied and unmanaged sludge
• Household survey, key-informant and secondary-data collection protocols
• Data triangulation, uncertainty ranges and evidence-confidence scoring
• Sanitation safety planning hazard identification across the service chain

Workshop: Participants construct an initial SFD and evidence register for a case municipality, identifying the largest unmanaged sludge pathways.

Day 2: Demand, service areas and collection systems

• Population, occupancy and containment-volume assumptions for demand modelling
• Desludging frequency, accumulation rates and annual emptying demand calculations
• Scheduled desludging versus on-demand market service models
• Vacuum truck productivity, route time and fleet-sizing calculations
• Transfer-station siting criteria and intermediate haulage options
• QGIS mapping of access, density, flood risk and priority service zones
• Worker safety controls for emptying and transport operations

Workshop: Participants map priority desludging zones and prepare a fleet, route and transfer-station scenario for the case city.

Day 3: Treatment, co-treatment and resource recovery

• Influent characterisation for faecal sludge solids, organics, pathogens and grit
• Treatment train selection for drying beds, settling-thickening, planted beds and mechanical dewatering
• Co-treatment screening at wastewater treatment plants using load and capacity checks
• Hydraulic and solids loading calculations for FSM treatment sizing
• Land area, climate, energy, staffing and residuals constraints in technology appraisal
• Biosolids, compost, fuel and effluent reuse pathways with market tests
• WHO Sanitation Safety Planning control measures and verification points

Workshop: Participants compare three treatment and co-treatment configurations and produce a weighted option appraisal with preliminary sizing.

Day 4: Finance, institutions and implementation risk

• Capital expenditure, replacement cost and operating expenditure structures for FSM services
• Lifecycle costing and unit-cost calculation per household and cubic metre
• Tariff modelling, willingness-to-pay evidence and pro-poor subsidy targeting
• Public, private and hybrid operating models for collection and treatment
• Institutional responsibility matrices for licensing, enforcement, payments and data reporting
• Procurement packaging for fleet, treatment works, operations and performance-based contracts
• Risk registers covering illegal discharge, non-payment, land tenure and operator failure

Workshop: Participants prepare a lifecycle cost model, tariff scenario and RACI-style institutional action matrix for the selected case option.

Day 5: Investment programming and plan defence

• Phased FSM investment sequencing from quick wins to networked service expansion
• Multi-criteria prioritisation of service areas and capital interventions
• Results frameworks with service, safety, equity and environmental indicators
• Baseline, target and verification methods for FSM performance monitoring
• Management information system requirements for desludging and treatment records
• Stakeholder engagement plans for communities, private operators and regulators
• Decision briefs and executive presentations for budget and donor approval

Workshop: Participants assemble and present an FSM implementation dossier containing the SFD, investment roadmap, financing plan, risk register and monitoring framework.

Tools & standards covered

QGIS, Microsoft Excel, SFD Promotion Initiative methodology, WHO Sanitation Safety Planning manual

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions