My First Meeting with SNV
{ August 7th, 2008 }
I had a great meeting today with SNV. Among many interesting things, they’ve been running a learning alliance platform with IRC Netherlands on IWRM and one on sanitation. There’s been a good amount of thinking on EcoSan here. EcoSan was first promoted in Uganda by the Ministry of Water and Environment. However, the MoWE is responsible for sanitation in public places. Therefore, the first EcoSan that people have learned about has been in markets and other institutions. From SNV’s perspective, the software necessary to go along with EcoSan wasn’t done, and so it’s been sort of a dismal failure.
At the same time, the Commission for Water for Production (also within the Ministry of Water and Environment, but with partial management by the Ministry of Agriculture) did a small, small pilot in the Southwest. I think that is viewed as better. In part, I think, because it was done with the purpose of using the excreta to aid in agricultural practices. Also, because the water table is high there, other latrines weren’t working well, so it may also be that played a factor in uptake. The Ministry of Education is responsible for sanitation in schools, and the Ministry of Health is responsible for sanitation in households. There’s been little movement on EcoSan from those ministries (they’re also not funded very well).
I described to SNV the Development Marketplace concept we’re using in Malawi, and they went wild over it. Apparently the Ministry of Business which is funded to the tune of USD 44 million (wow!) is very interested in the possibility of sanitation as a business. SNV thought that getting them involved would be very positive and that private sector folks, like fertilizer companies, would be very excited. It doesn’t sound like there’s much of a private sector entity for latrines yet, but they knew of at least on enterprising mason that might be able to be helped along to build a larger business (or something).
Along with selling excreta to fertilizer companies, SNV talked about examples of communities who didn’t like using the compost on their own food, but had no problem selling it to people in Kampala. So along with doing value chain research on fertilizer companies, I think it also might make sense to do some value chain research on companies buying produce to see if they could be contracted to buy the outputs of produced grown using EcoSan compost. We’ll have to think it through a little because it gets rid of some of the maintenance that is built into the DM model, but I think that there’s some good possibilities.
SNV was less excited about using a FRUGAL model on water sources. It sounds as though there’s a lot of complexity in the decentralization model as it pertains to the water sector that I didn’t quite grasp all of today, but I’ll keep after it. Basically there’s not been a good track record of private sector collecting water tariffs from communities. Communities haven’t paid and so get into debt and then don’t pay their debt. There’s some thought that perhaps the tariffs weren’t reasonable (something about a flat tariff set for the whole country?), and so that may be partly why it went sour.
However, there’s a guy at GTZ that is trying out a new tariff model that’s based on percentages (I didn’t understand all of it either), and so I’ll get in touch with him in the next few weeks and see what he’s doing.
Oh, and back to sanitation for a moment: SNV indicated that there’s a big need to bring the cost of EcoSan latrines down. Right now the country is for the most part using skyloos, but that there’s a call for arborloos and fossa alterna.
In summary, it was a great meeting!
