Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Lore Eco



Breaking the Stereotypes

At Lore Eco we have begun works towards raising ecosan awareness, popularization and ecosan toilets construction in early 2008. We began the project in the rural mountainous communities of Lore region, in the villages of Urut and Sverdlovo. Thus, the ecosan project implemented by Lore Eco with support of WECF addressed sanitation issues in these low income village comunities and the work has been done towards solving them by construction and popularization of ecological sanitation toilets.

The main obstacle faced was that of psychological stereotypes questioning ethical issue of dry urine diverting toilets and use of waste as a fertilizer. We started with workshops and meeting with the main segments - the private farm households, schools, local self government bodies. We tried to address the questions in a simple and effective manner, explaining the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach to sanitation. We tried to organize a dialogue while substantiating the need to make a new approach to sanitation needs, the issue of having proper sanitation within a tiny budget, the way to save their limited resources while achieving greater sanitary standards. Simultaneously, several ecosan toilets were constructed in most visited institutions such as schools and local municipality.

We believe that the project has contributed to beneficiaries in the way that they can keep proper sanitation conditions without having too struggled with fixed and monthly charges related to water supply and sanitation and generating more gender equality since female beneficiaries can attend schools and public buildings more frequently and use these constraints in everyday life.

Overall, the project was composed of two separate but equally important parts: first, to construct ecosan toilets in the villages, establishing a precedent and, secondly,to raise public awareness and break stereotypes, thus encouraging households to apply the techniques.

Finally, while building dry urine diverting toilets, we have strived to make them available to disabled people, also making them more easily accessibly to senior people.

In the next year, we intend to develop new techniques that allow to use traditional and available materials to construct affordable ecosan toilets. We believe that symbiosis of local traditions and architecture with new techniques can work effectively. We also have analyzed setbacks such as ways to keep the public dry urine diverting toilets clean and tidy, to ensure greater safety against vandalism and more effective popularization techniques and will account them in the next year.

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