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Dec 11th 2010
The Cost of Doing Business

From the Sanitation Challenge Ghanasan blog: In the Western World, we rarely think of the cost of sanitation. But here in Kumasi, Ghana and much of this part of the world, the cost of sanitation is a daily (or several times a day) challenge. Though it’s hard to get entirely accurate pricing information, here’s a brief introduction to some of the various sanitation costs we’ve come across:

Public Toilets generally cost 3, 7, or 10 cents per visit, based on the quality of the facilities and whether or not a sheet of newspaper is supplied. Doing the math, for a family of five to use the mid-priced toilet twice a day it’d cost over $250 a year.
Bucket latrines (which don’t seem to exist much in Kumasi but are still relatively common in Accra) are more affordable to build (they’re basically a structure built around a bucket) but cost about $8 a month to empty. They’re generally shared between several families, though, so the cost is distributed.
Basic pit latrine installation in a home can cost as much as $700, not including periodically emptying the pit, which is very expensive as well.Emptying a pit latrine, which needs to be done every few years, involves hiring a vacuum truck, which costs about $100 per truckload (some households take 2-3 truckloads to empty).
Flush toilets, connected to the city’s sewer, are out of reach for most of the city. In fact, the sewers only serve a thousand or so houses in a city with a population of about 1.5 million. So, although we don’t have the numbers for the cost of installation and use, it’s almost irrelevant since it’s so inaccessible.

There’s plenty of variability in these numbers, so we take them with a grain of salt, but it’s clear that the cost of sanitation as it’s currently provided is out of reach for many households. It’s no wonder that the people often look for ways to save money on sanitation (flying toilets, only paying for defecation, open defecation, etc)

– Danny Alexander, IDEO Ghanasan Field Team

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Sanjay Bajpai

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December 12, 2010, 02:54PM

Our strategy of waste management is excessively dependendent on transportating it somewhere else.This could be changed if we researched on becteria that would disintegrate human waste rapidly.(Say in three to four hours rather than days that it takes at present.

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Sabra Marcroft

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December 12, 2010, 07:01AM

As long as the wastes are seen as a problem to be disposed of, poor people will be disadvantaged. As soon as you see the human and animal manure, food scraps and agricultural waste as a resource, you have the means to solve the problem and help people build solid prosperity.
Both the tech and the industry of garbage to clean fuel and compost systems have advanced tremendously in the last 30 years. Numerous successful models exist in the world to draw from. It is tried and tested rural and urban systems. It has really been wonderful to learn about some of them through this challenge.
Overcoming cultural barriers (including our own) to profiting from something as dirty as food garbage or human feces can be challenging. It's hard to imagine that the solution to so many problems of poverty and pollution is to do a really good job of cleaning up our own waste.

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Dec 11th 2010
The Cost of Doing Business

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Sanjay Bajpai

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Dec 11th 2010 The Cost of Doing Business

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Dec 11th 2010
The Cost of Doing Business