This thought piece from the Toilet Board Coalition, in partnership with the Pune Municipal Corporation & Pune Smart City, India, discusses Smart Sanitation Cities and the opportunity they present to design future sanitation systems leveraging Smart City growth trends to address the global sanitation crisis. 

India’s rapid urbanization has resulted in overburdened infrastructure as the demand for safe water and sanitation increases. This problem, which disproportionately affects the urban poor, demands a sustainable solution. USAID has invested in urban water and sanitation activities across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to address gaps in service provision but has seldom had an opportunity to explore whether their outcomes were sustained.

From 1994–2011, USAID’s Financial Institutions Reform and Expansion–Debt and Infrastructure (FIRE-D) activity partnered with India’s central, state, and municipal governments to provide technical assistance to 16 Indian states. USAID published an independent ex-post evaluation that followed up on six states and cities, seven years after FIRE-D ended to look at the project's long-term impact, to understand how urban water and sanitation services have changed, and to what extent policies, practices, and financing mechanisms introduced through FIRE-D have been sustained. This is the fourth in a series of ex-post evaluations of past USAID water and sanitation projects.