Hey everyone!

My name is Kevin Shane and I'm the Communications Lead for Quicksand's social innovation and development projects here in India, most notably of which is Project Sammaan. I recently posted a project profile on SuSanA for this, but you can also check us out at ProjectSammaan.com.

Naomi emailed me suggesting this be done so that this space is less anonymous and more of a collaborative networking space; I think that's a great idea! Sanitation, after all, isn't like dealing in consumer products or any other space where competition leads to isolation. This is a problem that affects each and every one of us, so it behooves us to share as much information as possible as we work towards finding sustainable solutions for those that need it the most.

A little background on Quicksand and Project Sammaan:

Quicksand is a multi-disciplinary innovation consultancy that places user-centered design principles at the core of every innovation effort. The studio has successfully delivered on several new services, products, brands and developmental strategies, creating both measurable social and business impact.

Project Sammaan was born out of research Quicksand undertook as part of the Potty Project (PottyProject.in), an in-depth design research study focused on understanding three things:
- The end-user experience at community toilet facilities within urban slums in India
- End-user perceptions, attitudes, and mental models around sanitation and hygiene
- The “supply side” aspects of community sanitation in slums including things such as pricing, operations & maintenance, caretaking, and business models.

Quicksand is responsible for project management as well as anchoring the hardware design process for the project. The latter includes conducting user-experience testing and community feedback sessions, furthering the mandate to create a functional facility that reflects what people want and need, while also incorporating learnings from the Potty Project.

Quicksand, in the role of project management and hardware design leads, interacts and coordinates the efforts of various other partners, including the architectural partners, the project and contract management firm as well as community engagement partner, in addition to various subject matter experts on sewerage treatment and design. Updates with the BMC & CMC, as well as the Odisha Housing & Urban Development Department, are led by Quicksand as well, with support from the other partners, including the PMO.

Additionally, Quicksand is responsible for the project’s strategic communications. This covers everything from public outreach efforts, developing and maintaining the project website and blog, and developing the end-deliverable “toolkit” that will allow other organizations in the sanitation sector to replicate the project worldwide.

About me:

I joined the Quicksand team in February 2012 after a successful, if unfulfilling, career in marketing and corporate communications in the United States. I found myself at a crossroads in my career and opted to explore development opportunities outside the U.S. that would pair my communications expertise with work that contributed to improving people's lives, and not just a corporation's bottom line. I'm passionate about meeting new people, traveling, and experiencing new cultures and places.

I'd love to talk to any and all of you about your work and would also be more than happy to answer any questions you may have about our work. Please feel free to drop me a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.


Cheers!

Title of grant:
Communal Sanitation Solutions for Urban Slums

Subtitle (more descriptive title):
An urban sanitation project that seeks to design a new programmatic infrastructure and physical structure that instills a sense of dignity while addressing issues affecting sanitation practices and encouraging community members to stop open-defecating.
In addition to physical infrastructure, the project also seeks to improve the associated management systems in order to ensure long-term maintenance of the toilet facilities.

Name of lead organization: Institute for Financial Management and Research
Primary contact at lead organisation: Mushfiq Mobarak Associate Professor of Economics, Yale University, School of Management 135 Prospect Street, PO Box 208200, New Haven, Web: www.som.yale.edu/faculty/am833/

Grantee location: Chennai, India
Developing country where the research is being tested: Orissa, India

Short description of the project:
This is an urban infrastructure project that seeks to design and build improved sanitation facilities in the cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack in the state of Orissa in India.
It provides a new, holistically re-imagined model for urban slum sanitation facilities in India reviewing:
- Business models
- Architectural designs
- Communication interventions
- And facility operation models.

A total of 119 toilet facilities will be built and evaluated in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack in 2013-14. More than 24,000 persons are expected to directly benefit from this (200 per facility).
The hardware design process, which comprises of designs for the physical infrastructure of public toilets, community toilets – Base Layer and community toilets – Enhanced Layer, will include 18-24 unique facility designs that incorporate better ventilation, lighting, landscaping, etc. to improve the overall user experience.
Additionally, in order to understand the impact of different management models on usage and maintenance, community toilets are randomly assigned to a privately or community management structure.
In addition, to identifying a solution that will produce the most attractive, sustainable and hygienic alternatives to open defecation for slum residents, the program will test a variety of complementary household-level interventions, such as discount coupons for community toilet facilities and varying the pricing structure (monthly passes vs. pay-per-use), etc. The study also incorporates a program of demand generation activities in a subset of communities around community and public facilities. These activities will be used to help communities notice the problems associated with open defecation and develop community cohesion to sanction it.

Start and end date: January 1st, 2012 – March 31st, 2014
Grant type: Other
Funding for this research currently ongoing: BMGF, BMC & CMC
Research or implementation partners: The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Quicksand

Contacts, links, further readings:
Website: ProjectSammaan.com
Twitter: @ProjectSammaan
Documents in SuSanA library: www.susana.org/lang-en/library?view=ccbktypeitem&type=2&id=1793

Goal(s):
The goal of the project is to provide a replicable model of improved sanitation for urban slums that get used and sustained.

Hardware Challenge:
- Design facilities that people want to use
- Design facilities that adequately address unique sanitation needs
⇒ Are complementary services, such as bathing and defecation stalls, cost-effective and do they drive adoption?

Software Challenge:
- Facility level: design facility management systems that ensure sustainability
o Should toilets be run by professionals or communities?
o Do community managed facilities correlate with higher toilet take up than private managed facilities within a one year time period?
- Behavioural Challenge: design household and community behavioural interventions and marketing to encourage use
⇒ Can we make toilet use a habit?
o Multiple factors influence an individual's decision to practice open defecation. For some individuals defecation in the open is a well-established habit. The habit formation intervention component of this study aims to increase healthy sanitation practices by creating new habits, replacing the old ones. The study plans on doing this by using subtle clues and hints to form new habit routines and reinforcing the new routines with rewards.
⇒ Do time-delimited subsidies correlate with toilet take up more than non-time delimited subsidies over a one year time period?

Objectives and Results:

Objective 1: To develop an innovative, sustainable, scalable urban community sanitation model which will reduce the incidence of open defecation and improve health among the urban poor in the implementing partner cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack.
To-date Results: The architectural drawings for the facilities (on a site-specific basis) have been created, the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) guidelines and training manual are drafted, and the tendering process for the first batch of toilet facilities is underway.

Objective 2: Create a “toolkit” for successful urban sanitation infrastructure and management interventions based on the implementation and a rigorous evaluation of the project in two cities and disseminate the toolkit broadly through multiple channels.
To-date Results: The framework for the toolkit has been developed and is currently being populated with project-specific details by workstream. Learnings and insights will continue to be added to this work-in-progress document as the project progresses.

Objective 3: Engage in advocacy to encourage adoption, scale-up and replication of these innovations beyond our intervention sites and throughout cities in Orissa and India.
To-date Results: Capacity-building exercises with the local municipal corporations, as well as demand generation activities with the host communities continue to take place as the project prepares for construction.

Planned Improvements
5 different types of improvements were planned within the project:


Achieved Improvements:
Project Sammaan was born out of the research conducted for the Potty Project, an in-depth design research study focused on all aspects of the current sanitation models employed in urban slum communities throughout India. Potty Project research led to insights around opportunities to improve sanitation service delivery and, consequently, end-user perceptions around sanitary practices. These learnings were cased in four “pillars of innovation”: Operations & Maintenance, Branding Communications, Architectural Infrastructure, and Business Models.

Project Sammaan has implemented the insights and learnings from Potty Project by designing a new, functional, and easier-to-maintain facility, while also addressing the operational issues (e.g., role of the caretakers, pricing models, etc.) that have caused other sanitation options to fail. These improvements have been catalogued in the toolkit framework and learnings around them will be thoroughly evaluated going forward in order to quantify the actual impact each learning has had.

Biggest Successes:
The project team has had several key successes since the initiative’s inception, but perhaps the most significant are as follows:
1. Designs for various capacities of public toilets in Bhubaneswar were completed and requisite drawings and details submitted for the tender process to the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation.
2. The toilet facility brand name and statement has been created and presented to internal stakeholders for their review. Once this is approved, it will be shared with the general public and host communities.
3. Facility design features were finalized.
4. Multiple user-experience exercises that directed several components of hardware design (e.g., Universal Access Stalls for physically impaired users) have taken place.

Main challenges / frustrations:

1. Urban community sanitation model for sewerage

Sewage management systems are a necessary part of the sanitation puzzle and potentially a big failure point from a public health perspective. From a government perspective, scale of solution is an imperative. Existing statutes and cost constraints make it extremely difficult to experiment with new, untested technologies.
As such, waste management is a key component to Project Sammaan as shortcomings in this have frequently been the cause of failures in other facilities and improper storage and disposal of waste could lead to worsening present conditions and not improving them. Experts in this field are working with the project partners to identify the most effective technologies available, and to create a non-piped overall sewerage strategy to ensure long-term sustainability of the facilities.

The Project Sammaan municipalities present unique challenges given they either have limited (Bhubaneswar) or nonexistent (Cuttack) sewage networks. This means that there needs to be proper waste management systems at the facility level that provide both storage and treatment. These systems will also need to be flexible enough to allow for the facilities to be tied into a centralized sewage network upon its construction and completion. This will reduce the burden of individual facility waste collection and associated maintenance, as they will be tied into the central system.

2. Complex multi-stakeholder engagement

For a large infrastructure project of this nature, multiple stakeholders are a given. Within this dynamic there is an overall project objective, but also individual organisational goals that also need to be taken into consideration and addressed. At times, these individual mandates can conflict with the project’s overall goals with one team’s workstream impacted by the needs of another’s.
An example of this can be found in the innovation and design mandates. Imperative for some of the partners, these directives require considerable and conscientious ideation. This alone can be seen by stakeholders with limited understanding of the complexities and intricacies of design innovation as a delay. Add in the fact that creating something new and different means there is no true baseline for comparison, and processes like tendering become that much more complicated and can lead some to question the need for such layers of innovation.
Additionally, public accountability is of paramount concern to the city government anchoring this project. The innovation mandate is therefore severely bounded and has to be located on the side of caution or “reasonable risk”.
These competing interests puts the onus on effective and clear communication amongst partners to ensure that all partners understand the importance of each activity and how each ties into the overall project.

3. Financial and spatial constraints

To work within government frameworks implies that each toilet has to adhere to stringent benchmarks in place for standard public and community toilets. Most existing facilities built under these benchmarks are known to be a failure. Therefore the Project Sammaan facilities must not only adhere to this costing model, but to build a facility that will also be a successful, long-term solution while doing so.

4. Prototyping at scale

Project Sammaan’s long-term goal is to create a replicable, successful sanitation model that can be adapted by cities throughout South Asia and beyond.
In order to quantify the impact of this initiative, rigorous evaluation needs to occur. However, the methodology of this assessment requires a considerable sample size, meaning that the interventions, irrespective of their success rates, will be rolled out on a massive scale. It’s not merely one or two facilities, but well over 100 in dozens of communities; a considerable footprint to be certain.
This scaling-up competes with government accountability of providing basic sanitation to all its citizens. The active participation of partners at the BMC and CMC reaffirms their commitment to not just provide more toilets, but better ones.

Current State of Affairs and Follow-up:
The project is preparing for the construction phase by submitting formal project reports with both the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation and Cuttack Municipal Corporation as well as submitting the required tender documents. Following this, vendors will be vetted for building the facilities. Capacity-building and demand-generation exercises will continue going forward, as the team moves to complete work on the O&M guidelines and corresponding training manual. Additionally, the sewage strategy will be finalized soon. All of this, along with the activities in other workstreams, will be added to the toolkit.

Links, further readings, etc:
• Project homepage: projectsammaan.com/
• Project description on J-PAL homepage: www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/comm...n-slums-orissa-india
• Video of the project presentation at the USI South Asia Matchmaking Conference, July 2012:

• Video on branding and communication workstream: vimeo.com/63306861
• Video on Potty Lab testing for disabled users: vimeo.com/60256275
• Video about the Project Sammaan communications team’s slum homestay: vimeo.com/48576602
• Video on Potty Project’s research methods: vimeo.com/48361032
• Video on designing safer sanitation for communities: vimeo.com/43090258