An innovative sanitation system is being deployed into Vingunguti, Tanzania to provide safe sanitation as well as a fuel for energy and cheap fertilizer for agriculture.
As student volunteers for the Cambridge Development Initiative (CDI), Susannah Duck and Izhan Khan walked through the densely populated Vingunguti which is part of the largest city in Tanzania called Dar Es Salaam. There is a smell of uncooked meat, unrefined exhaust fumes and untreated sewage mixed into the sweltering heat. They have been designing and implementing a new type of sewage system that allows households to maintain safe sanitation despite being outside of the urban infrastructure.
They have been laying pipes to create a sewage network in order to replace the pit latrines that are mostly used here. Pit latrines are holes in the ground that can generate waterborne diseases and overflow during monsoon season.
This new system will not only clean up the streets and provide better sanitation, but also has a "digester" that generates methane gas and the output of that process is then "cooked" using a solar powered dryer to make fertilizer for growing food.
After adding the next 11 houses to the sewage network, CDI will have connected over 400 people and provide good quality sanitation to move 1.9 tons of waste out of people's homes everyday. Instead of just being moved, it's turned into fuel source and fertilizer for the community that they can use amongst themselves or sell to establish an additional source of income.
Getting all of this done comes with its challenges as the community needs to be directly involved in projects that affect them. CDI focused on community organization and financial ownership along with targeted skills and knowledge training to get the community mobilized and involved in creating the solution themselves.
The community has now formed a Sanitation Users Association (SUA) with an understanding of the responsibility for managing the construction and maintenance of their sanitation system. Householders were helped with their finances and loaned capital to construct their latrines with micro-finance payments organized through an NGO that is funded and run through CDI.
Many of the community members are extremely happy with the results so far, saying the dangers of cholera and malaria have now been eliminated, that peace between the neighbors is happening because of better conditions on the streets, and that there is no more embarrassment of using an exposed pit latrine.
The municipal water authority is also looking to take use the sewage model in order to provide access to safe and hygienic sanitation to 1,000 more people in the area.
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