City-Level Decoupling-Case Studies

that wish to adopt the ecosan work with other sanitation task teams in bringing the construction of the ecosan toilet to fruition.

The demand that is being triggered has to be met with mechanisms that allow the households to invest, as Malawi does not have a subsidy and the focus of agency support is more often rural. Critical is the financing mechanism. Currently two versions of Skyloos are available; a simpler version (with the same functionality but fewer aesthetic frills such as clothes hangers and soap holders for the shower) for 45,000 Malawi Kwatcha - K- (US$122 108 ) and a top of the range model for K65,000 (US$177). Householders are responsible for covering the full cost and contribute their labour in the construction. CCODE administers the Mchenga Fund which is a revolving fund backed by funding from international donor agencies and MHPF savings, which makes capital finance available to householders that wish to adopt ecosan. The loan is paid back over a two-year period at 12% annual interest. To date, there have been no formal evaluations to isolate and ascribe the impacts of the ecosan intervention. Although causality is difficult to infer without carefully designed evaluations, a number of positive impacts have been observed in parallel with the ecosan initiatives: 109 • Demand for Skyloos has grown, based on the space saving benefits for landlords and potential gains in household food security 110 and the mobilisation efforts of the Federation Sanitation Task Teams. • Skyloos free up space for other land uses – instead of the 450 m 2 previously required, 180 m 2 is sufficient to accommodate up to five dwellings. • Composted faeces and harvested urine are being used, albeit on a small scale, to successfully grow maize for household consumption, sharing and sale. • Compost and urine have economic value at the household level - not so much as a source of income generation, but more as a means of saving on fertiliser and or food. This in turn allows the households to take the risk of loan repayments on an ecosan investment. • Less buried faecal matter is linked to reduced groundwater contamination and associated health outcomes. Formal impact evaluations have less instrumental value to the initiative relative to process evaluation. The former are seen to divert scarce capacity, notably human resources, away from the initiative’s primary objective of supporting a sanitation movement driven by the Federation. Informal self-evaluations have been critical in the evolution of the response and are continually undertaken as the initiative develops, with ongoing dialogue between users, builders and CCODE and the MHPF sanitation task teams informing a strategy of improving the design of the ecosan toilets. Effects of the ecosan initiative

Learning from the case study

According to CCODE activist SikuNkhoma, workable and acceptable sanitation is “achieved through a process not a project,” 111 and building a social process around sanitation takes time. This time

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