More than half the world’s population live in urban areas. Many growing towns and cities, especially in the Global South, are marked by inadequate sanitation, sewage and drainage facilities.
With 3.5 billion people still lacking access to safe sanitation, most national and global sanitation drives have tended to focus on toilet construction, sewer connections and hardware. These have often ignored the second and third generation challenges of sanitation concerning water contamination, poor faecal sludge management, gender, equity and sustainability.
Yet, these challenges can also be an opportunity, as shown in the project’s policy brief. Human waste is rich in water, nutrients and organic compounds, but, usually, this mostly goes down the drain. The increase of extreme weather events, water shortages, and weak infrastructure mean that ‘flush and forget’ systems are not always possible or desirable in off-grid settings.
This is why the IDS-led project ‘Towards Brown Gold’ sought to understand the potential for reuse of faecal waste and how marginalised communities experience sanitation in five rapidly urbanising areas across four countries: Nanded and Alleppey, India; Mekelle, Ethiopia; Wa, Ghana; and Gulariya, Nepal. The research was both inter- and trans-disciplinary, seeking to integrate the social sciences, engineering, microbiology and creative arts to understand the socio-political, technical, cultural and microbial processes and contexts of sanitation and waste processes.