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There was a pilot project carried out by the BRE in Botswana which was reported by Swaffield and Wakelin in Low Cost Sewerage Ed DD Mara, Wiley, 1996, now out of print. This involved installation and monitoring of ceramic pans manufactured by Twyfords and were designed for a 3 or 4 litre flush I think. Interestingly Twyfords now market a similar 'rimless' design in the UK with a dual 4/2.6 l flush.

Ifo Sanitar developed in the 80's a 1.5 l flush pan which was marketed in Sweden for on-site systems, but not licensed for connection to a public sewer, but their website no longer mentions anything of the sort. However they do have an 4/2.6 l pan marketed by the Green Building Store in the UK.

There was a firm in South Africa that were manufacturing rotation moulded LDPE WCs I think they were called Watergate, but unfortunately they seem to have disappeared. I met the founder when he was trying to sell plastic pit latrine thrones to a project I was working on in Swaziland. I suggested that he modified his WCs, which were very robust and quite cheap, by reducing the diameter of the outlet and the volume of the trap. He went back to South Africa and phoned the next morning to say he had mocked up a low volume pan overnight and was terribly excited about how he could flush newspapers away with a couple of litres of water. I think that this shows that it is probably quite easy to design a pan that will work adequately, if not optimally, without huge amounts of development and testing. The problem is more in the manufacture and marketing.

I subsequently imported a container load to Zimbabwe which were installed in Bulawayo. I have no idea what has happened since then, which was more than 15 years ago.