Four Pillars of Innovation

Potty Project research led to insights around opportunities to improve sanitation service delivery and, consequently, end-user perceptions around sanitary practices. These learnings were cased in four “pillars of innovation”: Operations & Maintenance, Branding Communications, Architectural Infrastructure, and Business Models.

1. O&M

Community sanitation facilities are in an ever-deteriorating physical state with derelict toilet hardware, broken doors or tiles, and accumulating layers of filth seeming an inevitable end for most. Overcoming people’s perceptions around participation in cleaning and maintaining these toilets will be a key challenge.

Key learnings:

• Reframing the issue of maintaining a clean facility as one of personal or familial well-being rather than one of time or effort will help make it personally relevant and encourage participation.

• Caretakers lack the bandwidth to police facilities, leading to acts of vandalism, theft, and general misbehavior by users that all act as deterrents for community use. Designing systems that discourage these behaviors will make the facility sustainable and attractive to users.

• Unfair business practices that place financial burden on caretakers, along with the community perception of this individual as someone from a lower caste thereby making fee collection a challenge, makes maintaining and operating a facility a constant struggle. Mitigating this through improved business models and interventions that improve overall perceptions of the caretaker’s role would enable better management of the facilities.

2. Branding Communications

 Recent times have seen a surge in construction of community sanitation infrastructure for slums with government agencies, but these efforts have largely failed to advocate proper use and hygiene practices, rendering current solutions ineffective. Users of these facilities do not seem to understand the link between proper sanitation habits and disease transmission, making achieving behavior change a difficult task.

Key learnings:

• Making links between diseases and improper sanitation through community engagement activities are necessary to sensitize people to the issue and foster awareness.

• Behavior change can be seeded through emulation by engaging with key influencers in communities. People tend to be hesitant to change unless its value is reinforced by peers, or by seeing the positive benefits experienced by someone in their social network.

• Transparency in communication with the communities these facilities are housed in will help ensure its members feel like they are stakeholders of the toilet and encourage greater adoption and use, especially amongst those most at-risk (e.g., women and children).

3. Architectural Infrastructure

 Design and development efforts need to focus on toilet features and attributes that improve the user’s experience throughout the journey of the space, while recognizing that users will include women, children and the aged. Architects must also keep in mind a user’s perception of barriers of use of a toilet.

Key learnings:

• Creating boundaries (whether symbolic or physical) around both the toilet itself and the facility will help reduce instances of malfeasance (e.g., dumping of garbage, defecating outside the facility) by clearly demarcating the area in which defecation is to occur. This will reduce the footprint of the perceived “dirty area” or “zone of filth”.

• Designing for gender in the past has amounted to little more than ensuring privacy and safety by having separate, but symmetrical, facilities. This fails to take into account the different ways men and women club their sanitation practices: men tend to defecate and bathe at community facilities, whereas women tend to only defecate, coupling their bathing with clothes-washing at a community water point. Alternate space designs tailored to gendered sanitation practices would make toilets more useful.

• Most facilities do not provide mechanisms for disposal of menstrual waste, nor do they provide communications interventions that foster awareness around sanitary practices regarding menstrual hygiene. As a result, many toilets are blocked by pads and towels women attempted to flush and the facility grounds are littered with used sanitary towels. Taking this into account while designing will ensure awareness is nurtured while making for a cleaner, more hygienic, environment.

4. Business Models

Despite a lot of emphasis on creating thriving self-sustaining community sanitation models, most of the toilet facilities are currently unprofitable, in financial and structural disarray. Many of these toilet facilities have failed to create enough value to convince regular toilet users to pay consistently and, in turn, have failed to convince open defecators to use toilets. In other cases, lackadaisical management structures are partly responsible in different variations for this. There is a dire need to establish systems that provide users with a positive experiential service coupled with creative revenue generation mechanisms.

Key learnings:

• Interesting revenue-generation systems can be created if users can be convinced of the long-term value of safe sanitation practices, especially in regards to their personal well-being.

• User-friendly payment models need to be developed in order to encourage, and sustain, usage of sanitation facilities. Present models employed feature either monthly passes or pay-per-use fees. The former can be cost-prohibitive as many users do not have the level of income requisite for such a purchase; the latter can lead to costs that are nearly 4-times the rate of a monthly pass on an aggregate basis.

• Shared community ownership and maintenance offers an alternative to structured, hierarchical sanitation systems implemented by an agency (e.g. NGO, CBO). An example of such a model is allocating one toilet booth to neighboring families who know each other and reprimand others on misconduct, or getting familiar families to share the cost of a private toilet and use it among themselves.

These insights and learnings are the foundation that Project Sammaan is built upon, making it the implementation phase to Potty Project’s research phase. The failures, and successes, observed in various urban centers across India have been the focus of internal stakeholder brainstorming sessions that, in turn, have helped to arrive at conclusions that drive all Project Sammaan workstreams.

These conclusions were then rigorously tested amongst community members in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack wherever possible to ensure that they are in line with not only what people need, but what people want as well. This user-experience focus will continue throughout the project, including the effectiveness evaluation that will continue for years after the facilities have been built.