Engaging industry in innovative emergency sanitation design

In many emergency situations access to adequate sanitation is one of the strongest determinants of survival by people directly affected by the emergency. When disaster strikes they are often trapped in extreme conditions, putting them at very high health risk because of the collapse of crucial sanitation infrastructure. This situation often exists for a prolonged period after the disaster due to inadequate relief response. At times, especially in difficult contexts such as urban disasters or flooding, humanitarian actors lack sufficient capacity to ensure affected people have access to adequate sanitation. Unlike increased availability of emergency water supply options, only few alternatives for the pit latrine have been developed over the last thirty years.

As a result of discussion in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) cluster and, more specifically, at two emergency sanitation meetings held in 2009 and 2011 in the Netherlands, coordinated efforts were started to improve design and use of solutions that are adaptable to various emergency and recovery situations. You can find reports of these two meetings on the SuSanA website - WG8.
As a major outcome of these discussions it was concluded that better, commonly agreed design criteria will enable the private sector to develop emergency sanitation products that match the requirements of the humanitarian market.

The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs has agreed to fund a project implemented by a consortium consisting of the Netherlands Red Cross Society (NLRC), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Oxfam GB, and WASTE Netherlands.
WASTE, together with Aldus - building innovation, will implement the project on behalf and with support of the consortium. The project aims to develop functional and technical specifications that will allow design and development of selected (post-)emergency sanitation kits. It will focus on three key sanitation elements: 1) Elevated toilets (kits), 2) De-sludging equipment, and 3) Sludge disposal and treatment facilities.

The project consultation process shall result in specifications that can be used for a Call for proposals for Public-Private Partnerships to design, produce, field test and manufacture products to meet the above mentioned challenges. The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs hopes that the development and publishing of product specifications will stimulate the private sector to propose innovative solutions that meet the performance requirements of many emergency agencies in a variety of circumstances.

This project will, in agreement with the Susana secretariat, use the SuSanA website as a main communication tool. We recently send out a first short questionnaire to ask for experience with the three above mentioned sanitation elements in emergency (and reconstruction) situations.

We hope to find among the SuSanA network people who would like to cooperate in this project.

Please contact Gert de Bruijne at WASTE for more information: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Dear colleagues,

We received many responses on the first posting of the emergency sanitation design project on the SuSanA forum. Therefore, we would like to invite you directly to participate in this project.

The aim of the 12 months project is the deployment of a number of products that will provide a significant improvement for worldwide emergency sanitation programs. To eventually get to this goal, our first objective is to reach consensus on the products’ performances needs / production specifications.

Three key technologies has been identified during the workshop to be crucial for further improvement of emergency sanitation :
1 raised/elevated latrines
2 improved desludging options (pit emptying);
3 a sludge containment and treatment (including safe disposal)

The success of the project relies on the information, experience and ideas we receive from practitioners . Therefore, we would like to ask you about your professional experience with these thee options. The results of this will be the basis of the product requirements that will eventually become the designer brief to manufacturers of emergency sanitation products. The core group is convinced that this common process will result in improved sanitation technologies that meet our demands and requirements.

At this time we attached to this posting a primary questionnaire. You will find that the
questions concern little detail and are mainly focused on making inventory on your experience with the sanitation options . We tried to make these questionnaires as user friendly as possible.

When filling out these questionnaires, please take note of the following issues:
If you can, fill out at least one questionnaire for each of the three options you have experience with.
do include both ‘good practice’ and ‘bad practice’ situations, for both will offer valuable clues
It is possible that you cannot provide answers to questions on all phases of a specific sanitation program. This is no problem! In cases like these, provide contact information of persons that might provide us with the complementing information

The best way to save the word questionnaire is as PDF file and send it to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Upon receipt of your reply we will to send you a second round of questions that concerns the technology and products on a more detailed level. This second questionnaire will be focused on the information you provided the first time. At this point you will be asked to indicate if it would be possible to interview you by phone on your personal experiences.

Based on an analysis of the information of these two questionnaires and the
interviews, conclusions we will prepare the third Stoutenberg workshop with emergency and sanitation practitioners in February 2012.

Furthermore you find a project summary and planning attached.

Please share this mail with any person who can contribute to this common effort.


Thank you in advance.

Gert de Bruijne

Dear all

In relation to the project described above. The consortium is planning to organise a three days workshop that will take place at the UNESCO-IHE building in Delft in the Netherlands on 13 till 15 of June 2012. (13th June Elavated latrines. 14th improved desludging options, 15th sludge disposal and treatment)
In this workshop we are planning to bring some suppliers, some knowledge centres, and some humanitarian organisations together to discuss the 3 sanitation option. Organisations interested in attending (part)of this workshop can mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to explain their interest.

Dear Gert and Jan

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Our environmental engineering department here at the University of Kassel (Germany) is looking into these issues right now and I would be very much interested to see where your project is heading.
Especially the desludging and treatment sector will be for sure interesting for us, and I would be glad if I could also contribute to the discussions at the workshop in Delft.

Dear Krischan Makowka

I hope you will get into direct contact with us and that you can send to us some information on the work the University of Kassel is currently undertaking.

Warm regard ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Dear all

To identify the main key design parameter for the above three elementsand to evaluate their relative importance for organisation working in thefield of emergency sanitation, we would like to ask you if you could pleasefill in the attached questionnaire and send it back to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and/ or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it before the 10th of April.

Dear Jan

I will get into contact about the details of what we will be working on soon, once a few currently unclear issues are solved. Then I can also register for the workshop in Delft.

Otherwise, I would recommend you to have a look at the emergency sanitation section of the WaterSanitationHygiene.org forums also. Quite a lot of good ideas and examples for emergency latrines have been discussed there
www.watersanitationhygiene.org
(One topic I personally experimented with during my time in Pakistan last year, was this:
www.watersanitationhygiene.org/forum/php...php?f=367&t=1014
More of a brainstorm topic but maybe some interesting ideas for rapid latrine-block construction can be developed out of this).

Best regards

-Krischan

Hi all of you,

I would like to participate in the workshop(s) in June and find out what you found out about sanitation for emergency situations.

I will send in a request to participate - although the workshops may have too many people interested.

Kind regards, Hester Foppen, Aqua for All

Bob Reed from WEDC in the Netherlands to attend the emergency sanitation workshop, gave a presentation both at workshop and at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DGIS). Reed shared insights on the topic of emergency urban sanitation—shining light on the challenges and solutions. Emergency response has a history of focusing exclusively on rural communities. Carrying out emergency urban sanitation work poses difficult challenges as urban regions are often spread out.
The presenation Bob Reed gave at DGIS can be downloaded at www.irc.nl/page/72531 his presenation at the emergency sanitation workshop is attached.

Dear all,
thanks again also from my side for the great workshop we had in Delft!

Finally, we are very happy to announce that the workshop documentation is ready!

It took some time after we received all permissions to upload the presentations but now we are online! This is the link to the website: www.susana.org/lang-en/working-groups/wg...therlands-june-2012-

See here Jan Heeger, lead of working group 8, talk about the aims of the workshop and see some impressions of the workshop which took place at beautiful UNESCO-IHE in Delft:



Now, at this point, I would like to invite you all to give some feedback regarding the workshop. Be it you just want to let us know what you got out of the workshop or you would like to continue discussions or raise an issue that came to your mind sitting in the train leaving Delft... Feel free to drop a few lines here!

Looking forward to your contributions!

Have a nice evening
Best,
Enno