Sewage management systems are a necessary part of the sanitation puzzle and potentially a big failure point from a public health perspective. From a government perspective, scale of solution is an imperative. Existing statutes and cost constraints make it extremely difficult to experiment with new, untested technologies.

As such, waste management is a key component to Project Sammaan as shortcomings in this have frequently been the cause of failures in other facilities and improper storage and disposal of waste could lead to worsening present conditions and not improving them.

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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.

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This is part of a series of posts that shares more about the project partners and the important roles each plays.

CTRAN Consulting manages large, complex development projects by providing a mix of program management and technical assistance.

For Project Sammaan, they are the one-point contact for interfacing with various government agencies. In this role, they facilitate meetings with government representatives, assist in the land approval process, and are establishing Project Management Offices within BMC and CMC.

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Project Sammaan will lead to two things: 1) the reduction of open-defecation and improvement of health amongst urban poor, and 2) the creation of a “toolkit” for successful sanitation interventions that can be replicated throughout South Asia.

The second point served as the impetus for a recent Quicksand field visit to Bhubaneswar to meet with project partners for a review of activities, milestones, learnings, frustrations, and other pertinent developments. It’s hard to believe, but the project has been underway for over 6 months now and the team felt it was a perfect time to get all the partners together.

Incorporating these conversations into the toolkit is certainly a daunting task considering the number of partners involved and the complexity of their individual workstreams. However, these concerns are part of the challenge that got us excited about this grant and they continue to motivate us.

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Two children pose infront of their school in Sikharchandi.

Quicksand’s approach is about human-centered research and design and Project Sammaan encapsulates this.

An ancillary goal in this project is to engage and inform a larger community about sanitation in India specifically and life in the slums here generally.

For some of us at Quicksand, Sammaan represented the first opportunity to visit a slum community. We decided to share that experience by embedding Ryan and I (both Americans) in one of the slums we’re working with for 24-hours. The objective being to share what living without adequate sanitation would be like, if only for a short time.

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The Project Sammaan team was one of several Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantees invited to participate in their “Reinvent the Toilet Fair” this month at the foundation’s headquarters in Seattle.

Bill Gates speaking at the Reinvent the Toilet Fair.

The fair was all things toilet: from new designs to the loo itself, to waste collection innovations and everything in between. It was amazing to see what individuals and organizations developed under the banner of “Reinventing the Toilet”: from using organisms for waste disposal and generating energy from feces, to communications interventions for shifting attitudes and preferences away from open-defecation.

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