19-22 July, 2011, Kigali, Rwanda
Session 1:
Rwanda and Kigali’s success in environmental sanitation and hygiene measures
Ndayisaba Fidele, Mayor of the City of Kigali and Madam Mary T. Broh, the Mayor of Monrovia
Rwanda is quite an exceptional country with the willingness to provide its citizens with essential services. The aftermath of the war and 1994 genocide still makes it difficult to overcome socialeconomic problems, and both the war and genocide have exaggerated the problems of water and sanitation infrastructure provision in urban areas. Moreover, increasing population growth in urban Rwanda, particularly in the capital Kigali, has made service provision all the more challenging. However, despite these obstacles, Rwanda and Kigali’s success in environmental sanitation and hygiene measures is an inspiration to many other African countries. In this session, The Mayor of the City of Kigali, Ndayisaba Fidele, provided insight into Rwanda’s success in promoting sanitation and public hygiene.
The Mayor began by providing some background into the history of the development of
Kigali, explaining that before 2000, sanitation was almost non-existent; the city was in a poor condition with limited services and poor hygiene practices. He told participants that sanitation is not a privilege but a right for every citizen, and emphasized that the government had taken the serious steps and measures to put into place frameworks for promoting hygiene. "The main driving force in the Rwandan story is the political will coupled with [an appropriate] legal
framework, ensures community participation in enforcing hygiene", Mayor Fidele said.
He explained that the establishment of Environmental and Hygiene committees helped with lobbying, campaigning and generating public awareness. In turn, this led to the
“inspection” – a movement, coordinated by the Ministry of Health, to get communities to work as volunteers to look after their environment. The general public appreciated environmental policies such as the banning of plastic bags, implementing good hygiene and sanitation practices, and enjoying a clean and safe environment. Challenges created opportunities, such as developing carrier bags that are made from local recyclable materials. “Enforcement is a war
that you cannot win unless there is a concerted effort”, Fidele noted.
And how has Rwanda’s government managed to keep these mechanisms and policies to remain sustainable?
“If it is supported by the highest political will, and all organs [of State] are on board in terms of the police, army, civil servants and the community…. [the] practice becomes routine, and routine is then slowly built into the culture - this is the driving force for changing people’s
behaviour”, Fidele explains.
Mary T. Broh has been the Mayor of Monrovia since 2009. She is known for striving to keep the City of Monrovia clean and green. She echoed Ndayisaba Fidel’s sentiments saying that
“Kigali is a model city in hygiene and sanitation and it should be a learning centre of excellence
for all African countries”. Mayor Fidele agreed to the idea saying that both countries share similar challenges and a troubled past, adding that a twinning programme would help to build a

strong partnership. “Kigali is the fastest growing city in Africa. I am very happy to have met the
Mayor and see how we can plan to twin both cities.”
Session 2:
Linking Agriculture and Sanitation: How business-driven partnerships can create low-cost services to the urban poor
Emery Y. Sindani, Regional Representative East Africa, Sustainable Sanitation Design (SuSandesign.org)
The sanitation sector needs to transform the collected nutrients to safe inputs and link up with agriculture. In most cities across Africa the food production serving the population takes place in the immediate surroundings and within city limits, even in larger cities 50-80% of the food is produced locally. The soil is under great pressure to produce year after year and farmers invest little in future fertility. SuSan-design is spearheading integration of product/service design to produce better/cheaper toilets suited for easy/hygienic logistics, treatment science, creation of business oriented value chains suited for urban slums and the integration of agricultural partners into the business model.
Investing in business driven sanitation and innovation is necessary for cities to be the engine of economic growth expected in the emerging and developing economies. By reviewing the cost of pollution from open sewers, pit latrines during floods and the savings by providing healthy urban environments, governments should bring sanitation higher on the priority list. It is possible to rethink sanitation and go directly to sanitation alternatives of high user quality that also provide nutrients for food or fodder production. With higher energy prices, soaring food cost and urban pressures SuSan-design can inspire NGOs and Government bodies to achieve great results with less cost. The entrepreneurs and treatment science is being scaled up in
Kampala, Uganda to show that by diverting sludge truck collected human waste and dry toilet content to our treatment units you can plan a greener, safer and more health development path for your city or national development. The research from Kampala show that if the logistics are developed to assure sanitation for all the system can pay for its running cost by selling quality sanitation services and safe agricultural inputs.
Session 3:
“Beyond charitable sanitation approaches” - Making large public sanitation businesses work for poor people in Africa
Destina Samani, CREPA
Financing and sustaining sanitation infrastructure and service provision in developing countries is challenging to governments, development organizations, policy makers, utilities and scientists. This debate is often focused on infrastructure acquisition, hence urging governments and development partners to massively invest in infrastructure. Little attention is paid to the capacity of local service providers, to operate and maintain acquired infrastructure. This is of particular importance as government-contracted i.e. formal utilities serve less than 20% of urban populations.

Session 4:
DEWATS - How To Make Decentralized Sanitation Central To Thinking And Practice In Africa?
Stefan Reuter, BORDA, Levi Zulu, WASAZA, Lothar Reichert, Hering South Africa Engineering Pty
Ltd
The lack of urban wastewater management continues to be a huge challenge in Africa.
Conventional centralised approaches to wastewater management have largely failed to address the wastewater disposal needs of poor communities due to high capital investment, poor operation and maintenance or low connection rates. On-site latrine based sanitation solutions are not regarded as being safe for densely populated urban settlements. Progress in access to safe water often is worsening the situation, as many urban dwellers remain unserved with basic sanitation and the vast majority of wastewater and septage is discharged without any form of treatment into rivers and water bodies, seriously polluting water resources and causing a diversity of economic impacts.
As a result of this crisis, demand for affordable but effective wastewater management systems is increasing and there is a growing body of science and practice which demonstrates the opportunities for implementing wastewater management systems based on a decentralized approach. The decentralized approach – referred to as DEWATS – has been demonstrated to be a cost- effective and efficient way of wastewater treatment to improve environmental health conditions as well as providing opportunities for job creation through operation and maintenance services as well as re-use and resource recovery. Decentralized approaches also offer increased opportunities for local stakeholder participation in planning and decisionmaking.
There is a third way to sanitation for fast growing and densely populated urban settlements. DEWATS as been accepted as a concept and technology suitable for treating organic wastewater in urban areas, especially by communities, institutions and SMEs, where centralised sewage systems do not exist and will not be installed in the near future.
Session 5:
Delivering Radical Innovation in Sanitation for the Poor
Walter Gibson (Bear Valley Ventures) and Jeroen Ensink (LSHTM)
The session focused on a presentation of recent developments from an ongoing research funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focusing on innovative technologies design to deal with the problem of pits filling up. Walter Gibson from Bear Valley Ventures described how part of the research involves the collection of a large data set to develop a detailed understanding of pit filling in different situations. In addition to technical viability, the other dimension to the research is the focus on assessing the commercial viability. At present this includes market research of user interest of innovative technologies in Tanzania.

Among the technologies that are being assessed, three are showing greatest potential.
The most promising is referred to as Project Tiger, which is a bio-filter combining anaerobic treatment and Tiger worms to digest the solid waste followed by aerobic treatment. As many households aspire to a higher level of service provision similar to a septic tank, but cannot afford a septic tank, this technology is considered to have considerable commercial viability. Still in the stage of concept development is a treatment technology using Black soldier larvae fly to digest faecal sludge. The other technology that shows potential is the use of additives to promote rapid sludge digestion. However, as these are still in the process of development, it is too early to conclude whether these two technologies are viable from a technical and commercial perspective.
One participant suggested that it would be both interesting to look into more depth at the potential of biogas, which is already utilized in various countries. An interesting point raised during discussion was that the characteristics of faecal sludge changes over time in pits depending on the type of technology that is employed and the situation in which the technology operates. Hence, data acquired from conventional on-site sanitation facilities may not accurately depict degradation rates in the new technologies that are in the process of development. This may subsequently have implications on the modeling to determine rates of decay and degradation.
Social acceptance was considered to be a key factor for success from a commercial perspective; and in this respect the need to ensure that technologies meet the needs of women was recognized. For instance, locating toilets outside of the home can reduce convenience, privacy and security which have significant implications on acceptability from a woman’s perspective. This is recognized to be just as relevant for contemporary, innovative technologies as it is to conventional designs but evidently an important factor that needs to be taken into consideration. In terms of wider marketability, the conveners described how they are approaching various sources of venture capital. In the subsequent discussion, participants raised concerns that investors may not be willing to invest capital in technologies that have yet to demonstrate commercial viability in practice. However, the fact that there are larger investors with “deeper pockets” who can take bigger risks was raised. Consideration of application of these innovative technologies for other sanitary facilities – for instance for public latrines at municipal markets, was also mentioned as a possibility for additional market opportunities which may increase the commercial viability of these technologies.