Break

Progress is needed to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal #6, which includes the target of sanitation for all and no open defecation by 2030. In Kenya, approximately 79% of the population is using unsafe waste disposal facilities and access to improved sanitation methods has only improved by 5% between 1990 and 2015. Sanivation was founded in 2014 to provide accessible, cost-effective sanitation services to create sustainability in urbanizing communities. They have created fecal sludge treatment plants that not only safely treat the waste, but also create briquettes used for heating and cooking. Their efforts could be expanded by quantifying the social, environmental, and economic benefits their services provide.

In this study, three alternatives were evaluated: a no treatment alternative, their current treatment plant, and a projected, large scale, treatment plant. Factors including costs, amount of people affected, inputs and outputs, and energy produced and consumed were input into a decision support tool for data analysis. Using impact scores based on all inputs to the tool, the results indicate that the large scale, future treatment plant is the most sustainable and beneficial to the community. Results from this study can be used by Sanivation for potential sponsor and donation purposes in funding their upscaled fecal sludge treatment plants across Kenya and East Africa.