Mémoire
| Résumé : | Millions of people worldwide do not have access to proper sanitation facilities. The extension to flushable toilets is environmentally, economically, and socially not desirable. Moreover, soils are depleting and there is a growing need for sustainable soil management in agriculture. The compost toilet, and its specific design of the Urine Diverter Dry Toilet (UDDT), addresses these issues by offering affordable on-site sanitation whereby faeces are collected and transformed into organic fertilizers without using water. This technology has been piloted in 2007, in Arusha, Tanzania, through a project called Resource Oriented Sanitation for peri-urban Africa (ROSA). Through pragmatic qualitative research, whereby 27 interviews were conducted, the perception of the UDDT and human derived fertilizers, of both beneficiaries and non-participating farmers, is examined. The main assumption is that a technology is a social construct, and that its success or failure does not depend solely on the quality of the technology. The social context in which it is embedded plays a major role. The Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework and its concepts are used to guide the data collection and the interpretation of the data. Most UDDTs that were implemented in de context of the ROSA project, have been demolished over the last 10 years. The results show how reciprocal linkages between the technology and contextual factors (water availability, political engagement), culture (stigmatization, modernization and habits) and local knowledge influence the degree of rejection of the UDDT among the population of Arusha. A toilet transition in Arusha is not likely to occur in the near future, and it is important for future projects to take the contextual aspects into consideration. |
