If you thought toilets and shit aren’t popular topics of conversation, you would have been in for a big surprise if you were anywhere around the recent Reinvent the Toilet Fair (RTTF) that happened in March 2014 in New Delhi. In the second edition of the fair (the first was in Seattle in August 2012), more than 700 participants from about 47 countries gathered to discuss how to bring safe sanitation to the 2.5 billion people who lack access to it. The fair in India was co-hosted by the Government of India’s Department of Biotechnology and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with the support of India’s Ministry of Urban Development, and it showcased innovative products and approaches from various Gates Foundation grantees from across the (more…)

In the middle of all the madness that surrounds the release of tenders this month, we have somehow presented Project Sammaan at more forums this last fortnight than we have in the last year. This could be just plain coincidence, or that we are a little more comfortable talking about the hardware phase of the project now that the architectural designs are complete and the tenders are ready to be floated.

Whatever the reason for that may be, one thing it forces you to do is to distill down the project to its most basic parts. So here’s a 10-minute, podium pitch on what Project Sammaan has achieved to date and the key challenges (which have also been written about in a post here):

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The purpose of Project Sammaan, as specified in the grant proposal, is: “To develop an innovative, sustainable, scalable urban community sanitation model which will: (1) reduce the incidence of open defecation and improve health among the urban poor, and (2) lead to the creation of a ‘toolkit’ for successful sanitation interventions (in terms of both the design of community toilet infrastructure and an associated management system) that can be replicated in low-income, high-density urban areas throughout South Asia.”

It is this second point that makes the documentation and information-sharing activities amongst partners so vitally important. The intention is for partners to keep a record of their activities throughout the course of the project in order to make this toolkit as informative and viable as possible. The focus should be on the challenges faced as these will help frame the project while also providing insights to other practitioners that may be facing similar issues in their own sanitation projects.

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Communications efforts are a key part of Project Sammaan. In fact, the grant proposal itself identifies the creation of a dissemination toolkit as second only to reducing instances of open-defecation and improving health amongst India’s urban poor.

By extension, documenting the project’s activities is a vital exercise to ensure that as much detail as possible is captured as it unfolds. The value obviously being that information is captured as it happens, making the insights far richer and impactful than if they were revisited later on in the project.

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The mandate to document and share Project Sammaan developments and learnings manifests itself in many ways, and April’s activities are a prime example of this, with a video being produced, a media kit developed, blog posts being added to the website, and, most significantly, formal project reports for the municipal corporations drafted.

Members of the Quicksand and CFAR teams visited slums in Bhubaneswar at the beginning of the month to interview community members for a “voice of the people” video. Additionally, CFAR transcribed the video clips into the Odiya font, allowing their comments to be conveyed exactly as they were said.

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As we work on the many different challenges of Project Sammaan, it is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about the motivations behind this endeavour. The primary goal is building toilets for those underserved by the existing urban sanitation systems in India, but we should not lose sight of Project Sammaan’s original intention as a pilot project.

The lives of the thousands of people served by the toilets we are building will doubtless be improved through these facilities. However, the toolkit that will share the insights of this project will lead to an improvement in the lives of millions more people as other organisations and governments use our learnings and documentation to build even more improved toilets and sanitation facilities.

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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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With the architectural design stream moving along nicely, it was time to initiate the Brand Design workstream. While Project Sammaan is the internal name for the project, the sanitation facilities we design and build will carry their own brand identity.

It’s important to brand these sanitation facilities appropriately to ensure:

1. Optimal adoption amongst end users
2. A feeling of professionalism in the people who run these toilet facilities
3. Brand recall amongst stakeholders in the government (and other organizations working in this sector) to maximize future replication of our designs in other Indian cities.