Chennai Inner-City Units

The Need

Half of humanity now lives in cities and it is anticipated that within two decades nearly 60% of the world’s population will be urban dwellers.

Urbanisation is most rapid in developing countries and the challenges this presents are well documented. Poor sanitation for inner-city slum dwellers is the norm rather than the exception, impacting human health and environmental safety. Water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea are prevalent, and women, girls and children are adversely affected.

Our Solution

Wherever the Need specialises in eco-sanitation (ecosan), and we recognised that our highly successful ecosan composting toilets could be a useful tool in tackling the issues presented by inner-cities.

Ecosan offers a low maintenance and self-contained system for managing human output, bypassing such issues as a lack of sewage systems and water supplies. We think this is an ideal solution to provide basic sanitation directly to the urban poor.

The compost by-product will be sold to local farmers and rural communities, generating income to employ maintenance staff. Any profits will be reinvested, to take the initiative to new neighbourhoods.

The Project

In Autumn 2009 we began to design and construct a mobile ecosan unit that can fit into the smallest streets of the busiest slums. We initially trialed the project in Cuddalore, India, which was a success, and is now providing much needed sanitation facilities to around 400 people every day.

Based on this experience we have refined and developed a small and light model, which we are now ready to take for the first time to the inner city slums of Chennai, India.

Chennai is the capital city of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Located on the south east coast it has an estimated population of over 7 million people and is considered to be one of the most densely populated cities in the world, with approximately 20% of its population living in slum conditions.

The direct beneficiaries will be local people living in the neighbourhoods, where the mobile ecosan units will be located. They will have free access to clean, safe toilets, separate male and female cubicles – giving women and children much needed privacy – and hand washing facilities.

We estimate that one unit can potentially impact on the lives of 6,000 people.

How mobile ecosan work