Catholic Relief Services (see their Water and Sanitation page) have just published Rapid Assessment of CRS Experience with Arborloos in East Africa by Paul Hébert. It’s a really interesting account of the large-scale implementation of this terrific rural sanitation technology. Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:
From 2005 to 2009 in Ethiopia, 53,840 households in 7 regions installed Arborloos with the help of CRS and partners. … In Ethiopia, the large number of Arborloos constructed by households from 2005 to 2009 was nearly ten times the number of conventional latrines built between 1995 and 2004, which were found to be more costly and difficult for households to construct. CRS considers this expansion to be a major breakthrough with the potential for significant scale up.
The cost per household? Very little: USD 16 in Ethiopia and USD 19−21 in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.