Empowering Ownership: Community Engagement in Sewerage Construction

After three successful years of construction, CDI’s WaSH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene) Project is about to begin work on its fourth simplified sewerage network. Built in the informal settlement of Vingunguti, it is a cheap and flexible system, able to overcome the difficulties associated with densely packed low income settlements. In this blog, the two Community Engagement volunteers, Laura Barrett and Alice Murphy (pictured), detail the fundamental ethos of the WaSH Project: to complement the physical construction of these latrines with strong community engagement.

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 implications of such conditions are severe: the country’s annual economic loss caused by poor sanitation in 2012 was estimated to be more than 300 billion TSh (roughly £100 million).[2] Furthermore, the limited awareness of bacterial disease transmission and the importance of health practices such as hand-washing mean that community members are susceptible to diarrhoeal diseases. Children are particularly vulnerable: 13% of all infant deaths under the age of five in 2015 were due to preventable diarrhoea in Tanzania.[3]

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.

As well as preparing to start construction on our fourth route, the WaSH team have successfully set up the SUA for this new network and have begun official training. We are also working closely with local NGOs in order to promote health awareness and understanding. This year we are running workshops on topics such as toothbrushing, female hygiene and hand-washing for local primary school children. Moreover, the Community Engagement team has been working with an NGO, Bridge for Change, to create a nine-month workshop scheme focused on community bonding, entrepreneurial enterprise and life skills for the people living along our network routes in Vingunguti. ​

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).