Extending the life of latrine pits

There are an estimated 2.6 billion people who remain without proper sanitation facilities worldwide. To achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to halve the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015, the UN General Assembly has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation.

Progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals on sanitation coverage is still extremely slow, the reasons given for the slow progress are traditionally: the lack of political will, of investment, of motivation by individual families, etc. Lack of space, difficult geographical conditions and the inability to access pit emptying or desludging services also impact heavily.

Crucial questions families ask are "how long will it last" and "how will we empty it" or in the some cases where people have enough space to dig another pit how can they afford to move the superstructure. Thousands of latrines lie abandoned due to pits being full, which acts as a massive disincentive for people considering their first latrine.

Options for extending pit life include:

1. Designs which facilitate emptying and desludging technologies
2. Pit designs that separation liquids from solids, enhancing sludge digestion and liquid infiltration
3. Modified pit designs which encourage better aeration and hence aid solid digestion
4. Cheap enzymes, chemicals, microbes that increase the solids digestion within the pit
5. Urine separation latrines

Given that there are a number of research initiatives on-going in some areas, Oxfam GB is proposing to look at the options that are least investigated, including bio-additives and pit design? If such outputs could be developed, it would save families income in getting latrines emptied, or prevent having to move to a new site, again reducing expenditure.

There would be a significant impact on urban and peri-urban communities, as this would allow such people to have small functioning toilets. The downside may be that when the pit eventually fills up, it may be considerably denser and therefore harder to empty. Such outputs would also be extremely useful in semi temporary IDP and refugee sites where space is limited.

With the purpose of accelerating the progress on sanitation issues, members of the global community need to openly discuss pertinent issues, implement new policies and achieve measurable targets. United Nations agencies, regional and international organizations, civil society groups and other relevant stakeholders from all countries, have important and functional roles to play in relieving the world of this silent humanitarian crisis.

II. Goals of the proposed Research

The Goal is to:

• Enable families to extend the life of their latrine pit.

The Outcomes:

• Increasing R & D from a variety of actors in finding a solution
• Pit designs that decrease the solids and liquids
• Affordable additives accelerating physical decomposition of excreta, thus extending pit life and facilitating the safe removal of pit contents.

III. Project Design and Implementation

While there are a few ad hoc research efforts on these topics, there has been no systematic research undertaken on latrine pits the needs of the poor. To move forward quickly, we propose the following steps:

1. A rapid landscaping of relevant research in the US, Europe, South Africa and other selected countries. The landscaping exercise is expected to unearth interesting people/institutions and global specialists whose work can be applied low-cost excreta management.
2. A creativity workshop to develop and work through a number of ideas on how to best to move forward against the project goals, and to provide sufficient input to further refine the project assumptions, technology and project outcomes.
3. A scoping study to ascertain the sectors who would most benefit from modified pits and/or additives and to identity the cost benefits between current practices verses willingness to pay for a long lasting latrine.
4. R&D phase: developing and testing a variety of pits, enzymes, chemicals, and microbes.
5. Product design phase: developing and testing pit designs for different local contexts. Field tests for effectiveness and user acceptance. Testing of bio-additives.
6. Project evaluation and recommendations on next steps.
7. Develop and implement a dissemination strategy for the findings.

A major risk is that an additive cannot be developed meeting the criteria of being cheap, accessible, and having significant impact on sludge removal. Or pit designs cannot be replicated at the community level? In the event of such outcomes, much would still be learned from the focused research and field-testing.

IV. Monitoring and Evaluation

A monitoring/reporting schedule will be drawn up to check progress against the project timeline. Implementing partners would report monthly and receive bi-yearly monitoring visits from the project. The project will be independently evaluated at the end of the project period.

V. Organisational Capacity

Oxfam GB has been working in water and sanitation for the last 50 years and is presently working in over 70 countries around the world, on development, emergency and campaigning issues. Oxfam GB is globally recognized as one of the leading agencies in the Water and Sanitation sector. The project steering group would comprise of two groups of individuals, agencies and institutions. One group would be global experts in low cost excreta disposal, while the other would comprise of institutions and/or companies (including the private sector) already actively involved in the sewage sector.

Would you like to contribute ideas/thinking to the design of this project?

Please contact:

Tim Forster
Public Health Engineering - Capacity Building
Oxfam GB
Oxford, UK
Email: tforster@oxfam.org.uk