File:House of Emilly Walubengo (4507340779).jpg

English: Photographer: Laura Kraft

Date: 03/2010 House and compound of Emilly Walubengo. UDDT owner in Mumias (Kenia)

C. Rieck: With regard to the situation of toilets that are more fancy and modern than the houses: My Kenyan colleagues did not see an contradiction in it. They said it will push the landlords and households to increase their efforts to uplift their lives, improve their houses and so on. I don’t know if it really does have such an effect, but it could easily be evaluated after a year or two. I didn’t agree with that point of view and rather opted for simpler structures with locally available materials. That was in turn not accepted as appropriate by my Kenyan colleagues. It is a very interesting social context that could be researched on. What helps more, adjusting to the level of living standards or taking it a notch higher to initiate development?

The effect of building a fairly expensive toilet is that other people like neighbors might not replicate it. My experience has shown that people like to copy identically. If you don’t show them examples of how else you could build it and how much cheaper, the people just won´t bother to build an EcoSan toilet. They have other pressing priorities where they focus their financial resources on. Unless they see the neighbor harvesting double the crop due the “humanure”. Then they might see the incentive of getting creative and spend some money in order to have their own fertilizer factory (toilet).