Despite decades of effort, progress in safely managed
sanitationa
public sector mandateis stalling due to limited public funding
and poor governance, among other reasons. As a result, public health
has suffered and environmental degradation has continued. Social enterprises
that use innovative business models to provide on-site sanitation
services, also known as sanitation enterprises, are considered an
emerging solution. However, sanitation enterprises have not yet successfully
replaced public provision at scale. This work explores the barriers
that sanitation enterprises encounter in lower- and middle-income
countries. Q-Method, a mixed-methods approach that assesses social
perspectives on an issue, is used to evaluate major barriers and groups
of dominant perception for 19 sanitation enterprises operating across
20 countries. A total of 25 mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive
barriers are identified, ranging from affording capital expenses to
navigating political corruption. The results show that most of the
identified barriers fall into the financial barrier category, with
reaching economies of scale being the greatest obstacle for sanitation
enterprises. On the basis of these results, the premise of independent
profitability underlying the sanitation enterprise value proposition
should be reevaluated. Four enterprise types are proposed and can explain half of
the variance among the sanitation enterprises studied. The context
of a sanitation enterprise, including its countries of operation,
size, customer base, sources of revenue, and section of the sanitation
value chain, influences the barriers that the enterprise encounters.
This research underscores the crucial role of context in influencing
barriers for sanitation enterprises, emphasizing the need for investment
and for policy makers to take these contextual dimensions into account.