Elevated urine diverting toilets as appropriate adaptation to flood risk in developing countries

---

Lako Stephane, Ngnikam Emmanuel, Ndongo Barthelémy, Tina Magloire

Thursday 2 july 2015

15:05 - 15:20h at Europe 2 (level 0)

Themes: (T) Flood risk management and adaptation, (ST) Adaptation measures

Parallel session: 12K. Floodrisk - Assessment

---

Living in flood prone areas represent a great challenge to citizen in developing countries. Particularly when this concern access to water and sanitation facilities. As this is a serious issue for megacities in Cameroon, the MAFADY Project has been working on this with the objective of identifying best sanitation practices, analysing adequate low cost sanitation technologies and propose a toilet adapted to flood-prone areas of Douala. This article examines the socio-economic context of some districts of Douala, prone to flooding due to tidal variations and heavy rainfall. Then, from a defined set of social, financial and technical criteria, analyse the characteristics of existing sanitation technologies (latrines) developed in flooded ecosystems. Based on this analysis a model, which is a plastic drum twin pit Urine Diverting Dry Toilet (DUDDT) was designed and the constraints of its construction discussed. The DUDDT is designed with the Eco sanitation approach and alternate ventilated internal pit mechanism. The latrine which consists of a 250 litres plastic drum as pit, will serve for one year for a family of 06 members. The toilet has two cubicles; one for defecation and the other for bath. The cost of producing this toilet initially targeted to be at 360 000 FCFA, finally costed 530 000 FCFA during the implementation, leading to an increase of about 48%, but still ranging within the cost of those type of toilets in other contexts in Africa and Asia. For the context of Douala, this increase is due to increase of the unit cost for small quantities of material, but also the higher cost of labour and transportation of materials for small works. Structurally, the elements of the higher cost relative to the essential latrine components and which could be concerned by subsidy, are: the pit, the roof and the doors.