Kretsloppsteknik

Like many low-income countries, Uganda is struggling to provide sanitation to its inhabitants. Meeting the Sustainable Development Goal related to sanitation (SDG6) will require major investments in sanitation. This study uses the concept of service regimes to analyze existing sanitation infrastructure and services and their respective costs. The service regimes investigated are the sewage regime and the fecal sludge (FS) regime. The results show that approximately 56% of the fecal flow in Kampala is estimated as ‘safely managed’. The results also show that the annual per capita costs for the sewage regime (USD 186) are more than 13-fold those for the FS regime (USD 14). Additionally, there are large differences in subsidies between the regimes. When allocating public funds, decision-makers are advised to consider (i) number of customers within regimes, (ii) total capital and operating costs of services, (iii) cost allocation between stakeholders, and (iv) infrastructure performance.

McConville, J. R., Kvarnström, E., Maiteki, J. M., & Niwagaba, C. B. (2019). Infrastructure investments and operating costs for fecal sludge and sewage treatment systems in Kampala, Uganda. Urban Water Journal, 1-10.

We ended the year 2019 with a very fun activity – trying out a new role-playing game developed by Jennifer McConville and her colleagues. RECLAIM is an exciting, dynamic board game whose main purpose is to act as a learning tool for participatory decision-making on water and sanitation issues. There are several stakeholders represented in the game, and all players are allowed to role play each stakeholder, and collaborate to provide and improve the sanitation situation of their region. The board itself is modular in the sense that it can be arranged to depict that group of players’ cities, be it a peri-urban area in Uganda or the urban area of central Stockholm. Not only did we have a lot of fun role playing, but we also found it to be quite intuitive. At the end of the game, we as players reflected on how RECLAIM can be a great tool that can help community members to come together, share, and help understand each other’s perspective on sanitation and how such games provide an ideal platform to make that happen.

Role-playing and gaming are active learning tools, which are useful for learning relationships between technology and society, problem solving in complex situations and communication. For further information about RECLAIM, get in touch with Jennifer McConville at Kretsloppsteknik.