Orangi Pilot Project — Community-Financed Sewerage for a Karachi Squatter Settlement

Orangi, a self-built squatter settlement on Karachi's north-western edge, housed roughly a million residents by the 1980s with no sewerage: households relied on bucket latrines and soak pits, and raw sewage ran in open lane drains, driving high rates of water-borne disease.

Extend affordable, dignified sanitation to Orangi residents by removing contractor profit from lane sewer construction and having residents finance and build their own connections, with government limited to funding the shared trunk infrastructure.

Social scientist Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan founded OPP-RTI in 1980 around a "component-sharing" model: residents of each lane organise, contribute labour and pay for their own underground sewer connecting to a shared collector, while OPP-RTI provides technical design, surveying and simple tools free of charge, leaving the trunk ("external") infrastructure for government agencies to connect.

Residents in Orangi built more than 99,000 low-cost household latrines and over 1.6 million feet of underground sewer lines, extending safe sanitation to more than one million people at roughly one-fifth of the cost the Karachi Municipal Corporation would have charged for equivalent contractor-built infrastructure. The lane-based model has been applied in 160+ Orangi lanes and extended to more than ten other Pakistani cities, with adaptations documented in Nepal, Central Asia and South Africa. The programme won the 1993 Aga Khan Award for Architecture and a World Habitat Award.

Independent reviews, including planner Arif Hasan's own assessment of the scale-up, note that replication elsewhere has been uneven — success depended heavily on strong local community organisers and a responsive local government willing to fund external trunk infrastructure, conditions not always present elsewhere; women's formal leadership within lane committees is also less documented than men's.