19Sep 2018 by Becky No Comments
#WEDC41 Part 4: The wider system and the role of religion

#WEDC41 Part 4: The wider system and the role of religion

Water, World
In July, I spent two weeks in Kenya at the WEDC conference in Nakuru and visiting sanitation companies, Sanergy and Sanivation, and the newly-established sanitation research group at Meru University of Science and Technology. This is the fourth in a five-part series of blogs about that conference and those visits. You can see the earlier posts about (the lack of) government support for container-based sanitation businesses here, about WASH failures here and about behaviour change toolkits here. Nothing exists in a bubble. Sanitation is no exception. Sanitation is a social issue and any sanitation process will be affected by the communities, businesses, governments, NGOs and a host of other stakeholders that interact with them. Understanding that sanitation is part of a wider system and how that system works is a…
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20Jun 2018 by Becky 1 Comment

Why I’m not the right person to solve your problems: an engineer in sanitation

Water
I sat in a meeting recently about sanitation prototypes that are being tested in the "real world" - the informal settlements and rural households that they have been designed for, rather than the labs where they were created. As with any early stage testing, the prototypes have problems and it was these problems and the potential solutions that were under discussion at the meeting. While listening to these challenges, it hit me. As an engineer, I am not the right person to solve sanitation problems. Of course, there are some technical problems with the prototypes - materials that foul in a different way than expected causing downstream problems, control sequences that need adapting to deal with different circumstances - but it is the non-technical challenges that really interested me. Some…
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