Municipal public toilet concessions in Nairobi's market wards are widely understood to fail when operators withdraw, yet the threshold at which arrears trigger withdrawal remains theoretically underspecified. Drawing on the DHS Program indicator 'Nonusers who visited a health facility and discussed FP' across 36 African countries and 131 country-survey observations (1994-2025), the analysis uses the observed distribution of a comparable facility-engagement indicator to calibrate a threshold model of operator exit. The mean value of the indicator was 12.674 (SD = 6.52), with country values ranging from 5.70 in Morocco to 27.10 in Malawi. The framework proposes that operator withdrawal occurs not at a single arrears level but within a bunching band where fee delinquency, social obligation and regulatory ambiguity intersect. The contribution is a conceptual and methodological apparatus that links urban sociological theory of informal governance to the quantitative detection of arrears thresholds, offering a transferable approach for sanitation concession analysis across African market wards.
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Kipchumba Kigen Kirwa (2026) studied this question.
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