BACKGROUND

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the largest private foundations in the world, founded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda. It was launched in 2000 and is said to be the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world.

The Foundation's Water, Sanitation & Hygiene program focuses on developing innovative approaches and technologies that can lead to radical and sustainable improvements in sanitation in the developing world. Accomplishing this requires understanding issues across the entire sanitation service chain, including waste containment (toilets), emptying (of pits and septic tanks), transportation (to sewage treatment facilities), waste treatment, and disposal/reuse.

The sanitation crisis in India provides considerable opportunities for experimenting with, and implementing, new and innovative approaches to the sanitation space. Nearly 630 million Indians are forced to open-defecate each day due to a lack of adequate sanitation options, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives to water-borne illnesses, and billions of dollars in productivity. Additionally, women and children are put at considerable risk of violent assault when venturing into open spaces for their sanitation needs.

Project Sammaan is a holistic re-imagining of sanitation facilities for urban slums that pairs user input with innovation to provide a utility people want to use. The design and processes adjustments integral to Sammaan stem from human-centered design research conducted during the Potty Project, a year-long analysis of sanitation habits in India's urban slums. Findings on adjustments needed to aspects of community sanitation facilities and habits, such as business models, building layout and design, and communications interventions, were incorporated into Project Sammaan. These will ensure that the facility is both functional and a valued commodity in the communities they serve.

The project was born out of research Quicksand undertook as part of the Potty Project, 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.

The Project Sammaan interventions will be tested at scale in over 100 facilities across two cities in eastern India, with the intention of expanding to other cities throughout South Asia once the interventions are validated. An open-source toolkit is one of the key project deliverables, and will allow for easier replication for other practitioners in the sector seeking to address this issue.

QUICKSAND'S ROLE

The project was born out of the year-long ethnographic research study (Potty Project) that Quicksand conducted to gain an all-encompassing understanding of the shortcomings and failures of community sanitation in India's urban slums. As such, Quicksand is the lead grantee of the initiative, responsible for overall project management and all levels of government interaction, and anchors the hardware workstream.

Hardware for Project Sammaan essentially means the facility infrastructure itself, though there are multiple experts contributing to the overall design: an architectural firm to develop the site-specific blueprints for all facilities, sewerage management experts to develop innovative last-mile treatment solutions, government officials responsible for allocating budgets and land while also providing necessary project approvals along the way, an interface management team for record-keeping and capacity-building exercises with the government partners, engineers to prepare sites and review drawings, and a communications firm to develop and implement the facility brand.

Additionally, Quicksand applies user-centered design principles to ensure that the end-beneficiaries' inputs are taken into consideration so that the various interventions are in line with user needs and to ensure that the facilities are not only used, but valued as well.

In May 2011, the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a Project Sammaan stakeholder, conducted a Rapid Assessment of the sanitation facilities throughout slums in Bhubaneswar. This study covered such issues as: How many people were currently using shared sanitation facilities? What was the state of those facilities? Who managed them? Who cleaned them? How often people did people resort to Open Defecation (OD)?

This rapid assessment survey found that two-thirds of the individuals questioned lacked an in-house toilet, and that nearly one-in-five identified open fields or plots as the primary place for their defecation needs. These households practicing open-defecation reported worse smells, lower levels of cleanliness, longer queuing times, shorter opening hours, and, ironically enough, lower fees at the community toilet that serves their household. Additionally, surveyors also checked toilets directly and found those serving respondents whose households practice open-defecation have more crowding, a lower proportion of operational toilet booths, and are less likely to have water and electricity. This analysis indicates a correlation, or general relationship, between poor or inadequate toilet characteristics and a greater incidence of OD practice.

When comparing households practicing any OD versus those who did not practice any, there are statistically significant differences in terms of the functional sanitation facilities they have access to, as well as water and electricity availability. In Community Toilet-using communities, the presence or absence of an operational toilet and water was significantly correlated with the communities practicing open-defecation (i.e., in communities where the Community Toilets are more 'functional', less households practice open-defecation).

Quicksand works closely with the government to achieve the project objectives, in an attempt to tie in Project Sammaan's innovation efforts with the government's existing plans for urban slum improvement.

Most city governments in India are seriously looking into slum improvement through various programs ranging from the Rajiv Awas Yojana to preparing City Sanitation Plans under the National Urban Sanitation Policy announced by the Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India. The project thus seeks to innovate within the framework and constraints of the government's urban policy and planning processes. While this poses several challenges for the project's innovation mandates, it also ensures that the facilities that are built are more sustainable and do not become only 'models' of innovation, but truly usable spaces that enhance the quality of life of its beneficiaries.

By working through government-issued tenders that go through a detailed process of scrutiny and approval by government engineering departments, Quicksand also seeks to use Project Sammaan as a platform to build a model that enables adapting these innovations in other cities within pre-existing systems and policies of urban sanitation improvement. The budgets for the toilet facilities are primarily from government funds already set aside to build toilet facilities, with supplementary financial support from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, thus also making it a more sustainable financial model for scale.

In the process of working with city officials, the project would be successful if it can also influence planning processes and build an appetite for innovation, while also sensitising government officials to respond to the real needs of end-beneficiaries while planning city improvement projects.