Advanced Course on Sustainable Sanitation in the Three ELA Regions Successfully Conducted
Women in Europe for a Common Future conducted three trainings on advanced sustainable sanitation in Georgia, Moldova and Kyrgyzstan in the frame of the ELA program.
07.07.2009 |Fedde Jorritsma & Anna Samwel
Women in Europe for a Common Future conducted three trainings on advanced sustainable sanitation in Georgia, Moldova and Kyrgyzstan in the frame of the ELA program.
The trainings included the following topics:
• Improvement of cost efficiency and quality of urine diverting toilet systems
• Construction of the EMAS pump and reservoir
• Construction of a simplified greywater filter.
During the implementation year of 2008, 2545 people in households and 6414 people in schools have been provided with safe sanitation by WECF and partners in the frame of the ELA program. This is just a drop of the ocean given the 43 million people in the EECCA region that do not have access to safe sanitation. Therefore, the main question during the training was “How can we build a safe UD toilet which can easily be replicated?” In a brainstorm the participants identified that the toilet should be cheap, maintenance friendly without any smell.
48 Ecosan practitioners from Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia participating in the ELA program came together for four days and used participative tools to facilitate knowledge exchange among them and an expert from the Technical University of Hamburg. Technical details were discussed using pictures and schemes of different construction options using participative tools. Recommendations for cost effective and qualitative urine diverting toilet systems were formulated on each component of toilet construction in different conditions.
It turned out that construction costs and construction approaches considerably differed among the organizations in the EECCA countries and knowledge exchange was acknowledged to be very useful.
Beside knowledge exchange, the participants also learned practical new technologies. WECF staff has been trained by EMAS international (www.emas-international.de) on making reservoirs and hand pumps from locally available materials. The reservoir can be used to store a bigger amount of urine, which can be pumped by the hand pumps on the fields by tubes over a distance of up to 1 km. This improves the maintenance friendliness of toilets because the frequency of handling urine is reduced and the urine can be applied in the growing season.
A simplified greywater filter was built by the participants to treat hand washing water.
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