IWA Development Congress

I’m now in Mexico City at the 1st IWA Development Congress on “Water and sanitation services: what works for developing countries” (16−19 November). According to the homepage blurb it “will set the practice and research agenda for water and sanitation services in developing countries” and “it will have a strong focus on what works in a development setting and those projects that have potential for large-scale delivery” − well, that should exclude EcoSan!

Monday
The morning started off with the opening plenary addresses − all good stuff, of course, but I was glad to get some coffee when they were over!

Erdos Eco-Town: in the afternoon Dr Arno Rosemarin, of the EcoSanRes Programme at the Stockholm Environment Institute, gave a presentation on Striving for innovation: Dry and wet sanitation in multi-story apartment buildings with on-site compost and greywater treatment – the Erdos Eco-Town project − this was a good, honest (‘warts and all’) evaluation of the project, listing all the problems the project had had and why it’s now been replaced by settled sewerage. The paper’s well worth reading if only to make you happily realise that you’d never have considered doing anything like this yourself! [If you’d like a copy of the paper, it would be best to email Arno (arno.rosemarin@sei.se).] A little more detail on costs would have been nice − but the paper does say “Materials input for the ecosan system is higher than for the waterborne one [i.e., conventional sewerage] by about USD 920 for each household”, so it was always far from being a low-cost solution!

Tuesday
More opening plenaries! But later there were some good presentations, especially the one by Dr Juliet Waterkeyn (of Africa Ahead) on community health clubs in Uganda and Zimbabwe. Very interesting meeting in the late afternoon on sanitation in emergencies.

Wednesday
Yet more plenaries! The one by Dr Graham Alabaster was really good: the lessons learnt from some of UN-Habitat’s regional WatSan programmes and what they tell us about the best ways forward. In the afternoon Dr Elizabeth Kvarnström (EcoSanRes/SEI) gave a spirited presentation on the need to revamp the ‘sanitation ladder’ by using function-based (rather than the JMP technology-based) indicators, and Professor Christine Moe of Emory University gave an excellent account of her rural EcoSan work with indigenous communities in Mexico. The afternoon ended in splendid style with Professor Jamie Bartram (UNC) giving the final plenary of the Congress on What Works.

Thursday
Only rather unexciting field visits today, so I’m flying back to Cali for meetings on the giant American bamboo!

Overall this was a very good conference indeed. IWA should be proud that it has started this series of biennial development congresses. Special thanks are due to Dr Darren Saywell (IWA Development Director) and Professor Blanca Jiménez (Chair of the Technical Programme Committee) − you both (and your countless helpers) did us all and IWA proud! Muchísimas gracias!

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PS: Today − 19 November − is World Toilet Day.
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EcoSan in Africa

The WSP-Africa report Study for Financial and Economic Analysis of Ecological Sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Richard Schuen, Jonathan Parkinson and Andreas Knapp, is based on three case studies, which all promoted urine-diverting dry toilets, in Kabale (Uganda), eThekwini (South Africa) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

Based on the case study analysis, none of the currently implemented systems are seen to provide an obvious model for scaling up without considerable external support. Much research is still required to assess the costs of marketing ecosan compared with conventional sanitation, and to assess the costs of different management arrangements. ... There is need to look in more detail, at the different management arrangements and costs for setting up and operating house-to-house collection services. There may also be ways of introducing more cost effective technologies to enhance the efficiency of the operation. [Emphasis added]

‘Without considerable external support’ means massive subsidies. So now we know (again): EcoSan just hasn’t yet reached a stage where it can be implemented at scale in urban areas without the need for huge subsidies. So why is it so heavily promoted? Will all the EcoSanologists please wake up?!

Agua 2009

This week I’m in Cali, Colombia at Agua 2009, the biennial international conference on all things water. On Monday the main theme was water and climate change with some excellent presentations on Coping with climate change through adaptive management (by Professor Henk van Schaik of the Cooperative Programme on Water and Climate Change), effects on human health, on biodiversity, plus a few on the local situation in Andean countries. On Tuesday there were parallel sessions − I was at the one in nearby Palmira on New paradigms for urban water supplies and sanitation. On Wednesday I went to the session on wastewater treatment and presented a paper on Natural wastewater treatment and carbon capture − collect the biogas from a high-rate anaerobic pond to generate electricity and then use the final effluent to irrigate bamboo. In this way you not only produce a useful product but you should be able to earn carbon credits as some bamboos can capture over 30 tonnes of C per ha per year, so you could substantially reduce the cost of wastewater treatment − well, that’s idea anyway. Very swish conference dinner/dance on Thursday evening!

Dr Peter Morgan

During the 2nd Africa Water Week being held this week in Johannesburg the winners of the AMCOW AfricaSan Awards 2009 were announced. A press release dated Monday 9 November on the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs website gives all the details, including:

The AMCOW AfricaSan honor for Technical Innovation was awarded to Dr Peter Morgan, a Zimbabwean national, who for four decades has provided Africa with the most innovative technical ideas in sanitation and hygiene directly affecting poor people.

Peter’s achievements in sanitation are, quite simply, outstanding: the VIP latrine, the Arborloo, the Fossa Alterna, the Skyloo, and he’s also made equally brilliant innovations in water supply and hygiene − so the AMCOW award is very richly deserved. Well done, Peter!

Peter’s website is here.

Governments behaving badly

I’ve just re-read the excellent paper Institutional challenges in water supply and sanitation in Pakistan: revealing the gap between national policy and local experience (Water Policy 11, 582–597, 2009) by Bahadar Nawab (Department of Development Studies, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan) and Ingrid L. P. Nyborg (Department of International Environment and Development Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway). Here’s a quote from the Abstract:

Wide gaps were found between local people’s needs, desires and expectations and government policies and services, between people’s practices and historical and proposed institutions, and between local people’s and policy-makers’ understanding of the issues. The study warrants the formulation of realistic and people-centred water supply and sanitation institutions and engaging local actors in the processes. Along with regulatory mechanisms, the findings argue for the use of cognitive and normative instruments in the implementation of policies while tailor-making solutions to local culture, working together with local actors, rather than imposing solutions on them.

Amazing, isn’t it, that governments still don’t understand what they should do? It’s ain’t rocket science: they just have to work with their people. Over 30 years ago John Kalbermatten realised that the intended beneficiaries had to be part of the sanitation planning process (details here) − clearly a lesson that still needs to be learnt in Pakistan (at least in rural Pakistan, where the study by Nawab and Nyborg was done) and, of course, in many other developing countries.

However, Pakistan is showing the world the way in urban areas − read The Urban Resource Centre, Karachi by Arif Hasan (Environment and Urbanization 19 (1), 275−292, 2007). Here’s part of the Abstract:

The Urban Resource Centre is a Karachi-based NGO ... set up in response to the recognition that the planning process for Karachi did not serve the interests of low- and lower-middle-income groups. … The Urban Resource Centre … has created a network of professionals and activists from civil society and government agencies who understand planning issues from the perspective of these communities. … This network has successfully challenged many government plans that are ineffective, over-expensive and anti-poor and has promoted alternatives. It shows how the questioning of government plans in an informed manner … can force the government to listen and to make modifications to its plans, projects and investments.

So rural Pakistan needs to learn from urban Pakistan. A good NGO shouldn’t find this too overwhelming.

►Clearly an Urban Resource Centre of the type described above is needed not just in Karachi but in almost every developing-country city!

CLGS, not CLTS

I’ve had two nice emails in response to my CLTS blog of 27 October. Here’s an excerpt from one − from sometime who works for an NGO/charity in southwest England:

CLTS is excellent when it mobilises people, but to expect them to dig their own pits and use locally available material to construct a covering is absolutely absurd. And then do the same thing again when nobody is around to encourage them! In Sierra Leone they are telling people to build pit toilets in a flood area. Goodness knows what happened to common sense.

The other was from a Health & Sanitation Specialist working for the Rural Village Water Resources Management Project in Nepal − here’s a quote:

After one year most of the pit latrines were unused, unimproved and [people were not] motivated to rebuild the same; so we changed model and technology which found success − people's willingness to pay for choices are found for pour flush, easier to clean, looks fancy and available at local market. However, for same standard of latrine poorest of poor need to be financially supported by local governments and other in kind.

Stopping open defecation is just not enough. So I think what’s needed is not CLTS but CLGS − community-led good sanitation. Something to mull over, anyway!

EcoSan and the phosphorus crisis

I’ve never thought much about the argument that EcoSan is a good sanitation solution in developing countries because of the impending phosphorus crisis (see here and blog of 20 March 2008). It’s true that the cost of DAP (di-ammonium phosphate) reached an all-time high of USD 1200 per tonne in 2008, but prices are falling back to their pre-peak levels of around USD 320 per t, as shown in the figure below (from here; details also here − the World Bank’s Commodity Price Data for January 2007 − September 2009):


The World Bank projects DAP costs of USD 300 per t in 2010, rising to USD 360 in 2015 and USD 400 in 2020 (details here).

So perhaps all is not as bleak as the EcoSanologists would have us believe. Of course, industrialized countries should use less P than they do at present, but let’s not continue the argument that poor people in developing countries should have expensive EcoSan toilets because of this P crisis.

PS (again): can we please have details, including costs, on the Erdos EcoTown project?