SOLUTIONS

What makes us different from other charities? Well one thing is the amount of time the actual decision makers running the charity actually spend on the ground in Africa. Our co-Founder Stacey Travis actually spends about half the year in Uganda and South Sudan. You can read about her work in this blog.

Another thing is while it’s easy to talk about lives being changed by water, that is only part of the story. In reality, lives are changed through children getting a real education and helping themselves improve their own lives. Clean water at schools is the first step, in that a well at a school allows kids to be able to attend school instead of spending days fetching water. Real sanitation is the second step in that it keeps girls in school once they hit puberty.

A well in a village provides water to the village; a well at a school provided a better future for everyone.

Spending as much time on the ground as we do really gives you a much better of idea of what is going to work and what will not. For instance many other organizations install pit latrines, but because we spend so much time in Africa we actually end up being forced to use them on a daily basis. Pit latrines smell, they are scary to small children who think they may fall in, and they are almost always full of flies and flies are one of the main ways diseases are spread in the developing world. We knew there had to be a better solution, so we came up with one.

The Eco-Sanitation Flush Toilet we developed is  easy to install, cost-effective, and relatively maintenance-free. The toilet uses no electricity, or power of any kind and it actually treats sewage rather than just storing it. The system works by providing the optimal conditions for microbial activity that assists in the breakdown of sewage. The toilet’s only output is water and all solid matter is completely broken down inside the septic system.

First, we install a water well with a modified hand pump that sends some of the well water into a designated container to be used for general water needs, while the rest of the water goes into a separate reservoir tank. Next, we attach to this reservoir tank another pump, but this one is operated by a piece of playground equipment called a roundabout. Each time the children play on the roundabout, water is pumped from the reservoir tank to a hand-washing station and two sets of flushing toilets.

In the final step, the toilets are connected to a delayed septic system. Unlike the pit latrines that are common in Africa, a delayed septic system is designed to break down sewage into safe, 100% pathogen-free, 85% pure water in 28 days. This avoids the problem of toxicity from accumulated sewage, the need to relocate latrines, and the risk of groundwater contamination during rainy season.

Handpump modified with stealer valve

Roundabout pump used for water distribution

Overview of toilet block