Open Defecation Project | I-STEM


Understanding SDG #6


SDG #6 ensures access to water and sanitation for all


The lack of clean water and sanitation is not a problem, it is an outcome. The fact more than half of Nigeria’s population is still without clean water is not a singular problem to tackle, but rather a list of several root causes that led to poor infrastructure and economic stability.

When diving deep into how we can increase access to clean water and sanitation within developing nations, the team and I preformed a root cause analysis to see why this happens to begin with — we immediately narrowed the regions towards Nigeria and Ethiopia between population, current support and ensuring it’s not a cultural problem (we’re here to provide solutions, not change culture)

I was able to apply the same methods I learned by doing casual models in I-STEM towards this project, organizing ways we can start to break the problem down, and derive a solution. Instead of quantifying each bucket on which is the most impactful, we went on a hunch of infrastructure. Not only would it be fun to work with, but it’s also highly neglected by current NGOs


Why care?

We all know that the SDG #6 needs to be solved, it’s undisputedly important for everyone to have something as simple as water- but there’s also many non-obvious problems that derive from this.

  • Increases disease (Diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery, etc)
  • Decrease in schooling (Girls can be forced to stay at home without period sanitation)
  • Negative feedback loops (Causes generational problems, which creates a forever-lasting bad economy)

Having all these problems only further worsen their counterparts- for example more poverty leads to less sanitation, and less sanitation leads to more poverty, something must solve the spiralling cycle.


Our Solution

After selecting open defecation and it’s infrastructure as the sub-problem to attack, we wanted to find a way to make poop valuable. Having economic incentives is a must for any large-scale project to succeed, especially when not relying on donations- we needed this to be a sustainable model.

We explored soil, water and ash from personal interests, but after no luck on finding a straight forward way to make money, we did some research on the feces to begin with. We quickly realized the high carbon content within the feces, and knowing Nigeria is already a big exporter of charcoal we started to see if we can leverage the infrastructure of selling charcoal that exists, to sell charcoal made from the feces.


How do we take poop to charcoal?

There is an existing, well known and researched scientific process in which you burn off everything except for carbon- it’s called pyrolysis. After learning everything we could about the problem, we noticed most doing this use huge solar dishes that cost a lot causing the method to be economically unfeasible. As an alternative, we decided to heat the feces in a kiln, making the burn highly efficient

Before jumping to conclusions on the actual toilet, we seeked feedback from kiln engineers on our initial Sketch-up blueprints, this gave us the confidence to start building and testing. Our final design was essentially a chimney that would recycle the excess flue gases back into the box

Then, we started iterating with real materials, and successfully turned 40% of a mixture between human and cow feces to charcoal!

Designing the toilet

When making the toilet, there are two major things we had to keep in mind.

  1. Water is already scarce, don’t use it.
  2. Be better than neglected litrines, have no odor.

We started to cold outreach big toilet manufactures like KHOLER or TOYO, and established the most cost efficient way to reduce odor is a simple trapdoor in the toilet. The trap door must easily come up and down- similar to airplanes or trains. We were also told to separate feces and urine, because having both together creates a strong scent.


How does this make money?

Without a financial incentive, there’s no point. Not only do we want to provide free toilets for all, we want to alleviate poverty (Help SDG #1).

The following goes over how we can generate $45/month/family, while covering our all our costs- *average Nigerian family income is $57*

Due to intensity- check it out on Notion


What is success?

70% of Nigerians don’t have access to sanitation, 50% don’t have access to clean water, and 40% are in poverty. This solution alleviates all of that- we can implement this system nation-wide until those numbers turn to 0.

While we must focus on testing the core product to iterate and ensure maximum efficiency, the next step is scaling the user base. As more people get on, a snowball effect will occur, and the toilet will be widely accepted by the people themselves.


My personal contributions

I’ve been with the team from day one, and helped most ensuring an economic incentive to ensure both company profitability, and reducing poverty within the targeted region. We experimented (and failed) by paying the families directly in crypto- while it is significantly easier, they are typically limited to SMS, and it is hard to liquidate the cryptocurrency. Instead, we send a middleman service batches of Bitcoin each month, and rely on them to distribute accordingly as this is all a remote effort.

Between coordinating the making of toilets on-site with the carpenters, receiving the funding necessary to run experiments, developing a sustainable financial model and setting up pilots I’ve been able to apply several of my learnings from I-STEM to the real world. An example could be how I reached out to the Lazarus Care Mission International NGO while seeking families to test with, we did similar reach outs while doing the leadership project for school swag.

In conclusion, the I-STEM program has enabled me to logically follow a procedure attempting to solve a UN Sustainable Development Goal. The skills compounded from the past 2 years has led me to accomplishing this, and begin implementing real users. The immediate next steps following the current tests includes sourcing more funding to rapidly scale the project, aiming to have over one thousand users by end of 2022