Workshop on Waste Management

This workshop was held on 25 November 2010.

Number is huge:

2.6 billion People do not have access to basic sanitation.

We started the class with an overview of challenges in developing countries from sanitation point of view. Then we continued with a workshop. The main topic in concern was Kibera, which is an informal settlement that hosts more than 700,000 poor people.

Perquisites of the lecture included a video, Living in the Bucket. In the video, besides the sanitation problems, we saw a group of local youngsters working voluntarily on improving the condition of common toilets. It is obvious from the video that a little inspiration can cause a big change.

We started the workshop with a brief barnstorming on four topics. Then we were to choose one of these four topics. After the video I was already interested in the inspiration and community participation part so I took part in the group that worked on the question below:

How best to mobilize the community to improve their situation, what forms of organization should be proposed? Propose a mobilization strategy.

Brainstorming revealed three main topics to be considered to answer this question. These are:

1. Awareness & education: NGOs seeing a problem doesn’t necessarily mean that the locals perceive it as a problem. Maybe residents of Kibera are not aware that lack of sanitation kills more people than armed assaults do, in their neighborhood.

2. Coordination & leadership: how to organize the community? Youngsters should be a part of the solution.

3. Financing: sharing the costs between NGOs and the community can improve the involvement of the community.

Here are my take-away from the workshop:

• It is important to listen and understand people. From an office, one can see frame-work of the situation way different than the people in question see.
• Top-down solutions are not the best ways to solve problems of peoples.
• People are capable of taking initiatives on their own. People seem to need inspiration more than they need new technologies or external resources.
• New technologies or resources are not necessarily bad but when these are scarce, inspiration can be an effective mean to overcome difficulties.