The Big Necessity (34 page)

Oggy is all a Yorkshire farmer should be: dry of manner and of wit with a quiet strength to offset Sugden's energy. Suggy is untethered; Oggy is grounded, enough to say immediately, when I ask if he'd like to go to Tanzania to see the Gulper in action, “No. No chance. Why would I?” The genesis of the Gulper comes from the fusion of this friendship. It began one sunny April day in 2006 when Oggy was standing by the gates to his farm and Suggy arrived by car. “He must have talked for two hours straight about shit,” says Ogden. “I hadn't seen him for a while so after a bit I said, ‘By the way, how's your wife and children?'”

Sugden explained what he wanted. He showed Ogden some pictures of water pumps to inspire him. They Googled for some more. And after a few months, Oggy had a pump and Suggy got testing. First, they tried it on a barrel of cow muck, but it kept getting clogged. Oggy changed the valve to a hinged one (he tells me this as if it's impossible that I wouldn't understand engineering), and Suggy took it to Tanzania and
tried it on some pits. The second pit caused some trouble. “There was lots of cloth in there,” Sugden tells me, “and plastic bags from flying toilets. We started pumping and a pair of underpants got stuck in the second valve. We couldn't push it up or down so we had to take it to bits. I looked down at my shoes and my hands covered in shit and thought, oh well, all in the name of research.”

Oggy fitted the pump with an underpants-proof grill, and Gulper 3 was tested, again on cow muck. “I can still see Suggy teetering above the manure with a stick to stir it and make it thicker.” They put in drier cow manure to account for other pit latrine contents, to give the Gulper a proper challenge. It worked.

The Gulper—so named because “that's what it sounded like”—may be nothing fancier than a simple stirrup pump with underpants-related features, but it's good enough for several copies to have been ordered by Oxfam. Ogden is bemused by this, but he made the first few pumps. He won't need to do them again, because the point of the Gulper is that it can be copied. I see this attitude often in sanitarians. Dr. Pathak of Sulabh; Joe Madiath of Gram Vikas; the two Steves. None has applied for patents. None wants to remove his useful ideas into expensive inaccessibility. This generosity has a fine historical precedent: Dr. John Snow, the great Victorian doctor who identified the source of cholera, never patented any of his medical advances despite being a good enough ether practitioner to be requested by Queen Victoria when she gave birth. Patenting is daft, according to the two Steves. It defeats the purpose. “The idea,” says Sugden, “is to develop something a small-scale sector can afford and adopt. If you patent it, it's expensive and they can't adopt it. It has to be simple and rugged and bomb-proof.” The main technology was ready. Now he had to figure out how to make a business out of it.

 

Sugden's Gulper project comes under a banner called “sanitation marketing.” This concept arose from work done at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the early 1990s and derives from the more established discipline of social marketing, which was developed in the 1960s. To an outsider, social marketing might seem like common
sense, but in the development world, it was a breakthrough. If poor people were treated as consumers, and if things they needed—malaria nets, oral rehydration salts—could be transformed into desirable marketable products, then perhaps poor people could be made to want things they needed. Sanitation marketing does the same for toilets. Understand how and why people buy latrines, then make it much easier for them to do so. In official Sugden language, this translates into “to understand the natural acquisition curve and accelerate it.”

One of the foundation stones of sanitation marketing was Dr. Marion Jenkins's research. During the early 1990s, Jenkins spent several years asking the people of 520 villages in Benin what made them buy a latrine. She discovered that “as with any innovation, households will not adopt in a uniform manner and the categories of innovator, early adopter, late adopter, and laggard are as relevant to latrine building in developing countries as they are to the adoption of compact disc players or mobile phones in developed countries.” Other studies found that consumer durables introduced into the United States before the Second World War took about eighteen years to reach “take-off,” or proper commercial success. Communications and technology have since brought down this acquisition period to about six years in developed countries. In poorer markets, the timescale remains prewar. The goal of sanitation marketing is to take that eighteen-year period and speed it up using conventional marketing techniques like research, promotion, and improved supply chains. In short, in the words of a staffer at the WSSCC, the goal is to make toilets like toothpaste—widely available, cheap enough, and wanted.

In Dar, Sugden's goal was to make the Gulper part of a small business venture. He picked a small enterprise in Temeke called Tedegro that already provided decent garbage-removal services. WaterAid would buy the transport and the tank and provide the Gulper. Tedegro had to make the business work.

It sounds straightforward. So had WaterAid's first venture into sanitation marketing in Dar, in the densely populated low-income area of Keko Mwanga B. The idea was to make toilets more available, so why not set up a toilet shop? It would be staffed by a team of
fundis
(masons) and offer a select few toilet designs. It would be accessible, with a location
on Keko Mwanga B's main thoroughfare (not really a street, as it turns to mud in the rains). WaterAid followed the principles of sanitation marketing first by doing its homework. A market research study was commissioned that asked the residents of Keko what they wanted in a toilet. They said they were tired of their toilets, which were foul and unhygienic. They said they wanted something to change because even if they had latrines, their ground-floor houses still suffered when neighbors emptied their pits illegally. “What's the point of having a toilet,” they asked reasonably, “when shit still runs through the kitchen?” They said how sick they were of treading on plastic bags that were helicopter toilets, crash landed on their path. A toilet shop was a great idea. Of course they'd use it.

WaterAid went ahead with the project. A couple of demonstration toilets were built. But when I visit Keko a year on, a toilet
fundi
tells a gloomy tale. People may have had the intention to buy toilets, but intention isn't a sale. “Most people in the report thought the toilet center would be providing free toilets. The ones who got demonstration toilets had to pay a little money and so now everyone thinks they can get a toilet like that by contributing an iron sheet or a door.” In fact, as Sugden tells me, the toilets were too expensive. Because the cheapest model was still $270, it offered no advantage over what was already available. Keko's project may have failed, but it gave Sugden an idea. He estimated that 62 percent of the cost of the latrine went to digging the pit, lining the hole, and casting the latrine squatting slab. If the cost of the toilet were to be reduced, then the pit had to get smaller, too. The Gulper system would not only be able to access narrow slum alleyways but it would be more affordable because it would offer customers the option of only emptying part of their pits. Sugden calls this “a pay as you go approach.”

Tedegro's boss, a man called Mohando, is an ex-government official. Consequently, he has good connections, which smooth the running of his garbage disposal business. Its headquarters consist of a tiny wooden shack on a slum street in Temeke, where the Gulper is temporarily serving as a coat peg. Mohando has agreed to run the Gulper business in principle, but first he needs the nuts and bolts. Sugden has come to Dar to help source the equipment, and I tag along. Not from any interest in
Tanzanian aluminum factories, but because I want to see how a big vision—to remove the seas of shit that drown so many cities—can be built from little things. The complexities of urban planning make my head spin. But I can grasp a tank, a motorbike, and a pump.

A
piki piki
—a motorbike with attached trailer—has been sourced in a suburb of Dar. Finding the right tank to attach to the trailer is trickier. Aluminum is the first suggestion, but after several hours of searching, Sugden learns that there are no
fundis
in Dar who know how to weld it. The mood is demoralized and lunch is suggested. Richard proposes a restaurant that is “conducive.” I don't know what it's conducive for, but probably not for four men to earnestly calculate how much excrement the residents of Temeke produce. Once seated at the table, Sugden gets out his mobile phone and does his sums. One million families, with six people per family on average, producing 200 grams of matter per day on average. That makes 140,000 kilograms (154 tons). It would take 23 tankers a day to get rid of all that, or 280 trips a day by the
piki piki
to the waste stabilization ponds. To break even, they need to calculate the number of trips that can be made (five, probably) and a decent salary for the
piki piki
man (5,000–8,000 shillings a day).

Other considerations must be made. The tank should not be transparent “because we don't want people to see the shit slopping around.” Sugden has told me the story of the early Gulper experiments, when they emptied the pit contents into dark-colored plastic barrels and closed them too tightly. Dark attracts heat; excrement produces gas and pressure. The tanks exploded all over Sugden, and the WaterAid driver who had to take him back to the office has yet to get the smell out of his car or to forgive him. With this in mind, Mohando is worried about pressure. Should the tank be totally filled? Will it give? He asks Sugden with the expectation of a man asking an expert. Sugden is an expert, but only so far. There's so much we don't know about shit, he says sometimes. So much to learn. He tells Mohando the truth. “I don't know. This is new. You'll have to experiment.”

They order lunch and keep calculating. Other pit-emptying arrangements have been tried in Dar and elsewhere. The Vacutug, a gas engine–powered pump, was devised in 1996 by UN-Habitat. But it only travels at walking speeds, says Sugden, “so it can take ten minutes to
empty the pit and two hours to take to the waste stabilization ponds.” The MAPET was a human-powered pump, but it required three men to operate it, making for punishing running costs (in Mozambique, 73 percent of overheads were salaries). I see a MAPET standing stationary on a Dar street and hear that its business is bad.

Sugden thinks the Gulper will beat that. It travels at 50 mph, enabling much quicker round-trips. The answer is in the depth of the pit. The
piki piki
could offer more flexible options: two barrels emptied, or four, with scale pricing. “It needs to be a profitable enough business for them to get another
piki piki
,” says Sugden, “and to pay for promotion and marketing, but they can't do that until this gets off the ground. It's a chicken and egg situation.”

 

In Dar, I sit on a plastic bench in the yard of Simba Plastics, one of East Africa's biggest plastic manufacturers, and suppliers of the ubiquitous rainwater-collecting SimTanks that dot Dar's rooftops. The Gulper gang is hidden behind some water butts, sourcing a plastic tank to fit the trailer. They find one that is perfect and break out in smiles, even the gloomy Tedegro boy who has said nothing for two days. Their enthusiasm is great, but so are the obstacles. Even if the business does work, it can only transport its waste to the already loaded waste stabilization ponds, where it will probably be dumped in the sea or in landfill. “You have to make a choice,” says Sugden. “The argument is, what's worse, contaminating the environment or contaminating human settlement. Obviously the answer is we want to do neither, but it's a very difficult choice.” Pinned to the notice-board at WaterAid's offices in Dar is a cartoon of a man standing by his hut at the base of a cliff, on the top of which a huge boulder is poised to fall on him, while another man tells him, “Of course your main problem is nitrates in your water.” Priorities. Another cartoon shows two young men standing in front of a sign telling them to prevent cholera by washing their hands before they eat. “That doesn't apply to us,” says one to the other. “We don't have any food.” “No,” agrees his friend, “and we don't have any water either.”

Sitting on my bench next to some giant Coke bottles—Simba makes soft drink containers too—I consider that solving sanitation is as
complicated as it seems simple. It requires the juggling of priorities and budgets. It needs the reform of some local governments and the education of others, like Hanje's shortsighted ward officers. I think of how I have got a habit by now of asking all the sanitation professionals I meet how to solve the sanitation problem. I want a magic bullet. Nobody has one. They suggest flexibility is the answer. Adapting solutions to the context. Trial and error, and hoping for fewer errors. I think, can a pump with an underpants-proof grill really do any good? The field of sanitation is littered with pilot projects that die soon after birth. Other manually operated emptying systems—Micravac, Maquineta, Minivac—have never gone beyond the trial stage. At one point during the search, as the rain poured down, Sugden said with no noticeable emphasis, “We are chasing dreams.”

A few months after I get back from Tanzania, I contact Sugden to ask how the Gulper is progressing. He replies that Tedegro is making a modest profit. He's pleased at how well it's all going. He's got plans to develop an IKEA-style flat-pack latrine. He's been wondering about making fertilizer briquettes out of sludge, and tells me that Oggy thinks a machine he's devised to compress pork belly scrapings might be suitable. He sounds as energetic as usual, but his energy is tarnished with frustration. “Oggy and Suggy are a sticking plaster team running on a shoestring budget. I'm really struggling to understand why there's not a huge outcry about conditions in [areas like Temeke], why nobody with money is interested or even recognizes it as a problem.” If that continues, he concludes, “it will always be a sticking plaster approach.” Always one man and his dreams, no matter how grand or how gulping.