Revision history [back]

Hi Emily. It's a vast topic. But for rural areas, in the majority of cases, nothing happens: the pit gets full, you dig another pit, move your slab and superstructure (or do another one), and that's it. Emptying a pit is costly and messy so if you don't need to do it, you don't do it. That's why ideally superstructures should be easily movable, in practice it can mean that people build makeshift ones (bamboo/wood + sacks or tin sheets as walls) which can reduce the durability.

In small towns, you do however run into issues when they have a density that precludes digging another pit, but such a small size that an emptying service is not viable. In this case there is no easy answer; in WA we have some initiatives to look at (notably a co-composting plant in Bangladesh for a small town, and some experiments in Madagascar with emptying pumps and drying beds).

For a good starting point can I recommend the technology sheets on our website. And then maybe we could have an internal webinar / course on the topic for people interested...

Finally, LLTS stands for "Leader-Led Total Sanitation", a variant of CLTS developed in and for Burkina Faso by WaterAid. More information in this brief. THere are more recent docs but in French.

Hi Emily. It's a vast topic. But for rural areas, in the majority of cases, nothing happens: the pit gets full, you dig another pit, move your slab and superstructure (or do another one), and that's it. Emptying a pit is costly and messy so if you don't need to do it, you don't do it. That's why ideally superstructures should be easily movable, in practice it can mean that people build makeshift ones (bamboo/wood + sacks or tin sheets as walls) which can reduce the durability.

In small towns, you do however run into issues when they have a density that precludes digging another pit, but such a small size that an emptying service is not viable. In this case there is no easy answer; in WA we have some initiatives to look at (notably a co-composting plant in Bangladesh for a small town, and some experiments in Madagascar with emptying pumps and drying beds).

In cities you are right, although the vast majority of pits are not safely emptied: they often remain full (cost to empty too prohibitive), get emptied by informal / illegal emptiers (who work at night, use shovels and no protective equipment, and dump everything nearby), get emptied formally but tankers discharge everything in rivers (avoid discharge cost), treatment stations are often designed for sewers and not pit contents and are overloaded... a vast topic! There's a movement now to find solutions but also to analyse and map how cities are doing, hence the "shit-flow diagrams" (an example in my blog on different tools). We have done that for instance in Siem Reap (Cambodia) and several Ethiopian small towns.

For a good starting point can I recommend the technology sheets on our website. And then maybe we could have an internal webinar / course on the topic for people interested...

Finally, LLTS stands for "Leader-Led Total Sanitation", a variant of CLTS developed in and for Burkina Faso by WaterAid. More information in this brief. THere are more recent docs but in French.