We now had reached a point where everything was coming together; we had our uniforms, payments books and staff. A challenge we did not envisage was trying to find an old shipping container to store our items at the waste collection site. We spent 2 days driving all over Kumasi and following up on leads to buy/rent a container. We also needed to buy a poly tank to store water for the cleaning of the waste containers and preparing the toilet chemical. Our student from Cranfield University, who was tasked with analysing the waste, was also having challenges in terms of finding the correct measuring equipment locally. The week ended well with us finding a container and purchasing a poly tank.

Week 3 was a definitely the week of challenges, one of the biggest is importing things into Ghana! Week 3 ended with us finally receiving the waste containers and intermediate bulk storage container (IBC) which allowed us to get toilets into peoples home for the proposed start date. The containers had gotten stuck in Luxembourg and we needed to write a letter to the commissioner to get them released a long story but a good learning.

Key Learnings:

A key learning from the week is that cash is king in Africa; you cannot get anything done without showing the money.