ETH4D Projects Test Sanitation Solutions in Guatemala

Rural communities in Guatemala are among the most underserved in the world when it comes to centrally treated drinking water. When existing water treatment solutions are implemented, they often fail due to some of the same problems that characterize many development projects: difficulties with repairing and replacing parts, lack of local supply chains for necessary materials, and reliance on sustained behavioral change. Wanting to avoid falling into these same patterns with a promising chlorination device, Dr. Sara Marks and her team partnered with Helvetas Guatemala and the Ministry of Health of Sololá Municipality to conduct a before-and-after intervention study of the technology through a Research Challenge Grant.

The study helped evaluate the design, installation, and promotion of the A’Jín, a chlorinator developed with low costs and local production in mind, to inform a larger intervention being undertaken by Helvetas. Four water chlorination systems were installed and monitored over a period of six months. The A’Jín was found to significantly reduce faecal contamination, with the share of tap water samples with detectable E. coli dropping from 28% to 1%.

Despite this success, and while many household users reported satisfaction with the system and their resulting water quality, the study uncovered concerns at the operational level. For the system operators, reported disadvantages of the device included challenges like frequent clogging and availability of chlorine tablets. Their feedback revealed the need for further prototyping of the A’Jín. Dorian Tosi Robinson managed the implementation of the project and communicated findings like these and resulting recommendations through two knowledge sharing workshops with local stakeholders. The team was then able to co-develop an improved prototype design.

Moving forward, the improved A’Jín device is being rolled out by Helvetas and the Ministry of Health to reach tens of thousands of Sololá residents with great promise, informed by the learnings from this project. You can read more about the study via the team’s recent external page publication in PLOS Water.  

What if our waste management systems saw human excreta as a resource? In contributing to a closed-loop sanitation solution, the team behind this Research Challenge Grant project led by Prof. Johan Six imagined exactly this.

Project partner Mosan GmbH has been working to develop methods for recovering valuable resources from human excreta, such as phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium, through their container-based sanitation solutions for communities around Lake Atitlán Guatemala. These solutions allow for urine and feces to be collected in sealable containers via waterless toilets. This waste is then processed via a technique called pyrolysis to transform the waste into an organic fertilizer in the form of biochar.