Clean water plays an essential key role in keeping people healthy. But providing clean water without improved sanitation was only addressing part of the problem. We knew that in order for our program to be effective, we had to start adding toilets. The problem was that none of the toilets we were seeing were that great. The majority of toilets people were building were basic pit latrines. A pit latrine is basically a hand dug 40 foot hole with an opening that people would squat over. While this style of toilets has its place, they are not always the best solution. When used at large schools, pit latrines often fill up after just a few years. Because many areas don’t have any way of emptying these full toilets, they would end up being sealed up and another toilet would have to be dug as a replacement. It was quite common to see large schools with 10 or more sealed up, dilapidated toilets on their grounds. There had to be something more sustainable and permanent, but as much as we looked, we just couldn’t find one, so our friends Bill and Hunter decided to design one.
Aside from that the toilets smelled very bad and the also attract flies. Flies are not just a nuisance, they are also one of the most common ways that diseases are spread in East Africa. We knew there had to be a better solution, so our friends Bill and Hunter came up with our bio-digestion toilets.
These toilets never fill up, don’t attract flies and don’t smell. They are built with sinks outside of each set of toilets so that people can wash their hands afterwards and they do not need to be connected to a sewer or power grid. The first toilets that we built using this design are still working 9 years later and they have been written up several times in Uganda’s largest newspaper as a breakthrough in toilet design for the developing world.
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