Towards brown gold: Safe and sustainable sanitation in the small towns of Asia and Africa

The Towards Brown Gold project seeks to re-imagine sanitation in rapidly urbanising parts of Asia and Africa to help address the sanitation crisis and improve the well-being of poor and vulnerable women and men, and marginalised communities including migrants, sanitation workers and refugees.

Towards Brown Gold combines social science, law, engineering, microbiology and creative arts, to address the challenge of sustainable and safely managed sanitation in rapidly growing ‘off-grid’ urban areas in Ethiopia, Ghana, India and Nepal. Its starting point is to re-frame ‘shit’, a polluting and harmful waste product to be disposed of, as ‘brown gold’, a resource rich in water, nutrients and organic compounds, that can make a real contribution to the development of sustainable cities.

Rather than focusing on the visible aspects of being on-grid in terms of hardware, toilet connections, and treatment systems, Towards Brown Gold's focus is on the invisible and dangerous aspects of being off-grid. This includes invisible and powerless citizens who are denied their basic right to sustainable sanitation as well as the invisible flows of dangerous pathogens due to poor toilets and unsafe containment of shit and wastewater.

The aim is to rethink and reimagine these off-grid situations as a fertile ground for people-centred, sustainable and equitable innovation. Faecal sludge is rich in water, nutrients and organic compounds, but usually this resource remains hidden in the sludge.

It is hoped that reimagining the problem through the Towards Brown Gold project creates not just the possibility for new innovation in delivering good quality sanitation services but that it also promotes circular-economy driven sustainable sanitation to encourage resource recovery and reuse in informal settlements – turning ‘shit’ to biogas or fertilizer for example. The creation of these sustainable economic opportunities will hopefully in turn lift the status of the sanitation workers and excluded residents in informal settlements.

The Brown Gold project is identifying synergies and linkages between the five urbanising towns we are working in across Nepal, India, Ghana and Tigray/Ethiopia and working with local governments and communities to help create broad-based theoretical and practical knowledge on inclusive, safe and sustainable sanitation as well as resource recovery and reuse. We have shaped academic debates on sanitation in international development, and debates around circular economy by bringing a focus on social and environmental justice.

Through innovative, interdisciplinary research the project is advancing academic debates around sanitation, faecal sludge management and shit reuse. In terms of non-academic impact, we are working with local governments at the city level as well as currently seeking to influence wider national policy debates around sanitation introducing the concept of 'brown gold' with policy roundtables hosted in Nepal as well as participation in a National joint sector review. Significant policy, community, and academic engagement as well as fieldwork has taken place in Tigray despite the protracted conflict.

While these countries are in various stages of the process of framing policy for faecal sludge management, we will take forward the research findings in the final phase of the project to directly influence policy debates at the local and national levels. Furthermore, we intend to consolidate and share the comparative findings emerging from the project to influence global debates around faecal sludge management and circular economy, an important emerging area for international development. We organised a high-profile event on March 14 2034 ahead of the UN Water Conference in March 2023. Brown Gold findings were presented there and also at two side events at the UN Water Conference in New York from March 22-24.

The work of Towards Brown Gold is helping change attitudes and policies in Nepal. Engagement with the Ministry of Water Supply-led sanitation review led to two recommendations from Towards Brown Gold included in the final review outcome, the September 2023 Kathmandu Declaration of 20 Key Recommendations for Advancing the WASH sector in Nepal. These are Recommendation 4 which urges action 'for improved mapping, facilitating, licensing, regulating and standardising of water and sanitation services for both offsite and onsite sanitation services; and Recommendation 8 which stresses the adoption of municipality-wide inclusive sanitation approaches considering circular economy principles to contribute to cleaner water bodies and the environment.

A highlight example of the project's vision in action are the two sanitation mud houses at Nepal's Lumbini Peace Park. Crafted by local artisans with the Brown Gold team's inputs, their outer walls show the sanitation chain from households to septic tanks to dumping sites. More than 3000 visitors, including a local parliamentarian, students, and teachers, women's group members, sanitation workers, and key municipal officials, engaged with educational and outreach events at these sanitation mud houses between 2022 and 2024. These activities highlighted challenges of sanitation work and sparked conversations about shit that go beyond building and using toilets. Mr Sudhaker Pandey a Parliament member from Lumbini Province said, "The mud house is very useful, it explains how to make the toilet safe and how the water can become contaminated. I think (it) is giving very good message to the community."