In the obese city that Nairobi has become, Mukuru is both the newest and largest slum. Built at full speed in the 1980s on the edge of an industrial zone to accommodate a workforce rushing to the outskirts of the Kenyan capital, the district is a long maze of muddy alleys. Nearly 300,000 people live there, without mains drainage or a sanitation network. Due to a lack of infrastructure, the Nairobi River has long served as a toilet.
But just over a decade ago, Mukuru and its residents experienced a small sanitation revolution: Fresh Life, a branch of Sanergy, a company founded by American Lindsay Stradley, installed dry toilets in the township. They are scattered in schools, in the streets, in private homes and even in churches. Mukuru has a thousand. Blue or green prefabricated cabins that are easily recognizable. Inside, two bins separate the waste: one for urine, one for excrement. The containers are picked up daily by teams from Fresh Life.
Before, recalls Alice Leahwanini, a 49-year-old grocer, “we had two options: defecate in the river after dark or defecate in plastic wraps that we then threw out the window,” she recalls. This method had inherited the disastrous name of flying toilets (“flying toilets”). The little fragrant sachets swarmed in the alleys that had become almost impassable in the early morning. “It was a nightmare,” she says.
“It avoids splashing”
“We wondered how to improve access to toilets given that there is no sewer and it is unrealistic to see it appear in the township in the short term,” says Lindsay Stradley, established in Kenya for over a decade after studying management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. Instead of a flush, users use a powder of wood shavings, which they cover their defecations. “It both prevents splashing, which can cause diarrhea or urinary tract infections for women, and it helps kill odors,” says Lindsay Stradley.
The entrepreneur is one of the seven winners of the international competition launched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (partner of the World Africa) in 2011, a project to put engineers to work and invent the toilets of the future, if possible without water or connection to everything. -to the sewer.
To democratize its toilets, Fresh Life rents them to local entrepreneurs, residents or institutions. The monthly fee is 850 shillings (5.40 euros). The owners, in turn, charge the equivalent of 3 euro cents per use. Every day, 200,000 Kenyans use Fresh Life’s six thousand prefabricated toilets.
” It was horrible “
Boniface Sifuna has installed two in the small primary school, the Khaki School, which he runs. One for the boys, one for the girls. “Before, some students held back all day because they had to walk for several minutes and go to collective latrines”, rejoices the director.
In addition to hygiene issues, several residents point out that young girls and women are now less vulnerable to the risk of sexual assault. “It was horrible… Commuting at night for ten minutes in the dark to get near the river,” Esther Monuiva recalls, with a sneer of disgust. She proudly shows off the toilet she had installed on her plot of land in Mukuru. Its twelve tenants benefit from it free of charge. “Everyone wants to rent from me since I have a toilet inside!” “, she assures.
Every night, a team of collectors goes to Esther’s house to pick up the containers, which are then transported to a factory in Regen, Sanergy’s other branch, 40 kilometers from Nairobi. Human and organic waste is dumped on huge dryers and fed to millions of black soldier fly larvae. Once fed, the larvae are transformed into animal protein for livestock. The residue from this process is composted with other organic waste to make an agricultural fertilizer sold to local farmer cooperatives. The process caught the eye of USAID, the U.S. development agency, which awarded Regen $1.2 million in aid in April to “support access to agricultural inputs and production technologies while developing value-added processing in Kenya”.
