Sustainable Sanitation Alliance

The Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) is a loose network of organisations who are "working along the same lines towards achieving sustainable sanitation". It began its work in 2007, one year before the United Nation's International Year of Sanitation. The intention of creating SuSanA was to have a joint label for the planned activities for 2008 and to align the various partner organisations for further initiatives.

SuSanA's vision document contains a definition of sustainable sanitation which was developed by the SuSanA partners in 2007. There are currently around 260 SuSanA partner organisations. All prospective new SuSanA partner organisations have to agree to the vision document when they join.

SuSanA is not an NGO (non-governmental organization). It has no legal structure and takes no membership fees. It encourages other organisations to join the network and to become active members in the thematic working groups.

The SuSanA secretariat is funded by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development which has commissioned the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) for this task. Other SuSanA partners make contributions for example by paid time of their staff members. SuSanA also has over 5000 individual members.

SuSanA's goal is to contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to the Sustainable Development Goals after 2015 by promoting sanitation systems which take into consideration the five major aspects of sustainability, i.e. (i) health and hygiene, (ii) environmental and natural resources, (iii) technology and operation, (iv) finance and economics and (v) socio-cultural and institutional.

Since 2007, SuSanA has held 22 meetings (the last one in August 2016). Each year one meeting takes place in connection with the and a further meeting usually takes place in the Global South, where it is connected to another WASH event. SuSanA also organises side events, seminars and working group meetings in conjunction with other major WASH conferences.

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