Funded through the GCRF Off-Grid Cities and Sustainable Energy call, “Towards Brown Gold” seeks to address the challenges of marginality, sanitation and wastewater management in five growing towns in Ethiopia, Ghana, India and Nepal.
Good sanitation is pivotal for human wellbeing, productivity and health but the situation in rapidly urbanising areas is often characterised by poor or unsafe excreta disposal, inadequate faecal sludge management (FSM), lack of adequate infrastructure for sewage and wastewater collection and treatment. This combined with poverty and intersecting gender, class and related exclusions make safely managed sanitation in our expanding urban areas an urgent global challenge.
Our starting point for this project is that such challenges can also be an opportunity to rethink and reimagine off- grid towns as a fertile ground for innovations that are people centred, inclusive, sustainable, equitable and also contribute to economic growth. Faecal sludge is rich in water, nutrients, and organic compounds, but usually this “brown gold” remains hidden in the sludge.
The project’s interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary team bring together social science, law, engineering, microbiology and creative arts expertise to help facilitate bottom up processes and innovations co-produced between user communities, private entities, state agencies, civil society and other policy stakeholders. Through circular economy approaches and intersectional analysis, we will explore how shit can move away from being a taboo to being seen as “brown gold’. Our intention is that these innovations help address the sanitation crisis, enhance off–grid economies and improve the well-being of poor and vulnerable women and men, and marginalised communities such as Dalits, migrants, sanitation workers and refugees.
The programme will examine four primary questions:
- How do local communities perceive, experience and live with off–grid sanitation challenges and how do these lead to processes of marginalisation?
- Which kinds of socio- technical and institutional processes/innovations are required to re-imagine shit as ‘brown gold’ in ways that are environmentally safe, economically viable and also tackle social exclusions?
- How can these locally appropriate innovations around resource recovery and reuse be facilitated to be socio-culturally acceptable, and socially inclusive? What are the trade-offs?
- What kinds of policy, business and regulatory frameworks enable/disable the uptake, scaling up and sustenance of these innovations?
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