At present, over 80% of residents in Dar es Salaam live in low-income, high-density settlements that suffer from a lack of adequate sanitation.[1] The majority of households use pit latrines that crack, collapse and leak. Indeed, the preferred emptying method is simply letting the latrines overflow into the streets during the rainy season - paying a vacuum truck to empty them is a luxury not accessible to most community members.
The simplified sewerage network is part of the WaSH Project’s solution to this problem. We connect approximately twelve households to each route, and each household has a representative who sits on the Sanitation Users’ Association (SUA). This representative is trained in key issues such as how to manage the latrines and how to ensure the smooth functioning of the network in terms of behavioural, technical and financial issues. These training sessions are designed to impart skills to the community which they are unlikely to obtain elsewhere, as well as reinforcing the community’s complete ownership of the network.
Participation in such schemes breeds ownership, which fosters ‘self-empowerment’, a theme at the root of a lot of CDI’s work. The SUA structure and local participation model are fundamental to ensuring the network’s sustainability: ultimately, it is the community who are responsible for the functioning of their latrine system. Every initiative undertaken by the WaSH team aims to move the project closer to our overarching goal of a model which runs without any external input. It is only through sustainability that such projects have the potential to beneficially develop communities and globally spark long-term changes.
[1] https://www.unicef.org/media/files/JMPreport2012.pdf, UNICEF/ WHO (2012). [2] https://www.wsp.org/sites/wsp.org/files/publications/WSP-Econ-San-TZ1.pdf, Water and Sanitation Programme (WSP) (2012). [3] http://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main.ghe3002015-TZA?lang=en WHO (2012).
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