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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Additional disabled user testing needed to be conducted, so we began seeking out participants through various channels.

After failed attempts at recruiting users through various organizations, we decided to use the snowballing method of recruitment where you ask someone you know to connect you to someone they know and so on. We looked closer to home and reached out to our office staff. Our cook, Mr. Dayanand, offered to help us recruit people from his community in ‘Chiragh Dilli’, as well as at a nearby temple where a small community of disabled people beg for alms.

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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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