Economic Feasibility

Urine incentive program: tanks are delivered, measurements are taken, and customers are compensated.

Drivers for sanitation

This project aims to identify and strengthen the drivers for sanitation. In the hopes of achieving 100% sanitation coverage and surpass the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), we are interested to know if urine-derived fertiliser production can be one such driver.

The goal of this research will be to determine the conditions under which urine collection, transport and processing are attractive to both the municipality and the urine diverting dry toilet (UDDT) user. This will be done by estimating the UDDT owners’ willingness to accept an incentive for urine transport, testing the incentive schemes which are the most likely to succeed and then determining the overall program efficiency for both the municipality and the UDDT owner.

Incentives

Incentives (also known as conditional cash transfers, results-based financing, etc.) are mechanisms for achieving socially desirable outcomes, essentially by paying someone to do something. Unlike welfare or subsidies, the payment depends on action. Incentives have been used effectively in health and education programs, but never with sanitation. Furthermore, previous work has examined the willingness of households to buy or pay for sanitation services but there have not been any examples of users being incentivised to use those facilities.

We hope that by giving urine a value we will also give households an incentive to use and properly maintain household toilets, thus improving hygiene and reducing open defecation.

Nutrient-Incentivised Sanitation Plans

By understanding how a urine market could operate in Durban, we will develop a model which could be adapted for, and implemented in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and ideally, lay a foundation for the rapid spread of nutrient-incentivised sanitation plans.

Other examples of value-added sanitation projects:

• Productive sanitation project in Aguié: Niger demonstrated to farmers the benefit of “fertilizer factories” (toilets)
• Photos: set from the urine-collection and sale project ECOSAN_UE2 in Kourittenga, Burkina Faso
• Article by L. Dagerskog, M. Bonzi [pdf]: Opening minds and closing loops – productive sanitation initiatives in Burkina Faso and Niger