Month: February 2012

A blog I’m following but which doesn’t have a ‘like’/recommend/share option…come to think of it could be useful to get this on mine too.

I’ve been interested in this issue actually – of the debate on sewerage vs. on site because of the political implications in the debate. It was stimulated by a debate at Stockholm for which I drew up a table of political point scoring (but didn’t post), trying to guess who would be winning at each juncture and revolved around a question put by a political representative from the new, proud republic of South Sudan following a series of presentations on on-site sanitation for urban contexts.

The question was ‘why can’t we just have the sewerage systems that you have in the West? Why use these on-site latrines?’ I couldn’t help but feel that the question touched on a number of issues –

– Obviously there’s the technical answer which applies to the territory. At the time, an answer was given by one of the panellists – a professor from Leeds that addressed the issue by saying that there are operators in the West who ‘curse the day’ they adopted sewerage systems. It was an interesting answer which seemed to impress the South Sudanese delegates. In fact, I followed up this question in a recent lecture by asking 2 experts. They gave a series of answers which from a technical perspective were, again, quite convincing – for example, specifically with regards to South Sudan, the territory is not suited to sewerage because of the quantity of water that needs to be used in what is a very water scarce territory.

However, what I’m really getting at here is that on-site sanitation doesn’t seem as aspirational as sewerage systems that we developed in the West. Aspiration here is really key to a great many of the sanitation debates that technical people and engineers don’t tend to address. My opinion is that Ecosan is a prime example of this. I asked a lecturer (Ref to be inserted) who made a very convincing argument regarding the shear quantity of water that is wasted through the use of water-based sewage treatment vs. dry treatment, whether he had thought about how to market the solution he was proposing? In fact, he responded that he didn’t think this sort of solution would be adopted on a large scale until it was popular among the rich as a high tech solution. This is exactly what I would argue with Ecosan. If you are expecting the market to take to this sort of solution, but it requires such a fundamental change in practices which are intrinsic to the every day lives of every person in that community, it has to be something that is popular and aspirational. The on-site proposals often don’t wash because they don’t seem to address the ‘want’ and aspiration question.

An argument by Maggie Black that was put to me in response to my question from the political angle was a ‘did you know’ that Japan has 50% onsite sanitation? In fact, no, I didn’t know that and it is both surprising and a useful fact to counter the kind of preconceptions that come with arguing for on-site in a developing country context. To me it did have an initial smack of donors experimenting with new ideas in their playground and I can imagine this being a pretty powerful dismissal in left wing circles.

This sort of information can perhaps help to remind us that it should really be a technical issue of ‘what works’ rather than a political issue of what it looks like from the outset. Nevertheless, political perspectives are important and shouldn’t be ignored or dismissed by any measure.