The wastewater podcasts, part 6: Latin America

An interview with Maria Eugenia de la Pena (Senior Specialist for Water and Sanitation at the Inter-American Development Bank).

Dec 23, 2022

This is part 6 in a series of seven articles about wastewater that I will publish until 24 December. All are based on podcast interviews I did in the past months, in cooperation with UN-Habitat, with seven experts worldwide.

In the virtual grand tour through the Global South, we have already covered a lot of ground: the Caribbean, West Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. However, there are still two white spots on the map: Latin America and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. I made two more podcasts on these regions; let's stay in the order of the podcasts and focus today on Latin America.

Maria Eugenia de la Pena

I was joined in the podcast by Maria Eugenia de la Pena. She is a Senior Specialist for Water and Sanitation at the Inter-American Development Bank and brings a wealth of experience in wastewater management in Latin America.

Maria Eugenia studied civil engineering in her home country of Mexico and continued her Master's in Environmental Engineering at the Technical University in Hamburg. After several career steps, she started working at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), where she worked with governments to design, develop, and finance projects. Her focus is on water, sanitation, waste management, and drainage. She has worked in most of the 26 countries where the IADB is active. In her career, she has approached the WASH and wastewater topics from different angles as an NGO, a government official, and an expert at a development bank.

Financing wastewater management

Financing wastewater management was mentioned by every guest in the five previous podcasts as a pivotal issue. So I was happy to have found an expert who combined expertise in wastewater management with years of financial knowledge. When I mentioned what others had shared about the financing challenges, Maria Eugenia recognized that and said financing for wastewater management is also hard to organize in Latin America. It requires capital-intensive infrastructure, which is only part of the investment needed. In addition, funds remain needed after the opening of a plant to operate and maintain the facility.

But neglecting wastewater management is not an option since that has vast and expensive consequences for public health and the environment. And other less obvious negative impacts are generally not considered by governments. For instance, low levels of wastewater treatment impact tourism in cities or near lakes and beaches. Governments also tend to ignore the impact of poor wastewater management on property value. Therefore the IADB highlight the benefits of investing in wastewater treatment in their contacts with Latin American governments. It is just as crucial for development as transport, power supply, or access to the internet, which governments usually have identified as priorities.

Why development banks can make a change

Asked about the specific added value of development banks to promote wastewater treatment investments, Maria Eugenia mentioned the positive impact these banks can have in the countries. It's not only that they bring money to the table, but they also have a wealth of positive and negative experiences to share. So working with a development bank means that you can move faster since you can avoid mistakes made in the past in other countries.

She gave an interesting example about relaxing the official regulations and standards. It sounds counterintuitive since you would hope that a development bank would promote stricter standards. But imagine an expensive wastewater plant producing effluent that's so clean that it's close to drinking water quality before it is discharged into a very polluted river. That clearly doesn't make sense; therefore, the IADB is trying to show governments the broader perspective. In this example, it would be better to reach more people with only primary treatment instead of a more expensive tech-heavy tertiary wastewater treatment for a smaller community. And then, some years later, it may be time to move up to secondary treatment. So it is this kind of strategic planning where development banks can bring in a broader perspective based on experiences in many countries.

Another advantage of working with a development bank like the IADB is the ability of banks to bring innovation in a traditionally risk-averse sector. For instance, development banks can promote cheaper and more efficient techniques. Maria Eugenia summarizes the approach as follows:

"Thinking differently, changing the paradigm, that's how we approach this topic: choosing different technologies, choosing different ways of getting to more people, and giving appropriate solutions to achieve the goal of improving the conditions of the population and the environmental protection."

Technology

It made me think of the earlier podcast with Hendra Gupta in Bangkok, who promoted the idea of decentralized wastewater treatment systems, so I asked Maria Eugenia if that would be something to encourage in Latin America. Although she sees many advantages of decentralized approaches, the bank is not promoting specific techniques. Instead, it encourages governments to explore different options, which could be centralized, decentralized, or even solutions at the household level.

She sees as one of the advantages of decentralized systems that the approach fits well with the increasing demand for reusing wastewater because of water scarcity. For reducing the amount of untreated sewage, and reusing the treated water, it makes more sense to have that closer to where you need the water instead of transporting it back and forth to a centralized plant much further away. The technology is also often cheaper and easier to install. But on the other hand, it is easier to have a team of qualified people operating a centralized plant than to manage and monitor the conditions in many sites. So there are benefits and challenges. It is, therefore, essential to consider specific local requirements before deciding what type of system is the most appropriate. Nevertheless, you'll often see that it's worth exploring decentralized systems.

There is no “One solutions fits all” approach

We then discussed if countries genuinely explore all available options before deciding on the best wastewater treatment approach. Maria Eugenia noted that many countries prefer to use only one technology. In other words: governments like to build what they already know. She remembers from her university days that she was only educated in a limited number of techniques. She would prefer an approach in universities where students are encouraged to learn about more diverse technologies. One of the ways that the IADB promotes making use of a broader range of techniques is by doing pilot projects and then assisting in scaling up what works best. The bank also encourages study trips and exchanges so that the experts can learn from experiences in other places.

These are just some of the many issues we discussed in this podcast; I encourage you to listen to the full podcast via the button below (or you can find it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts).