Final day of the hackathon and interviews

Yesterday we heard the final presentations of the hackathon. All the groups had good ideas mainly dealing with recycling as waste is a huge problem factor which many groups picked up to solve. Another topic dealt with the problem that people put their garbage to the sewage system. The idea was to install sensors in the pipes that transfer pressure information to be able to locate the problem site. The final winners team wanted to install an SMS service to locate problems within Chamanculo. The user would have to give the location and the description of the problem and the municipality could receive the information fast to provide help. All five teams created very good 5 min pitch presentations and we were able to see the development of the ideas every day.

Our SGT group gave an example presentation one day earlier as we were not part of the competition. We introduced the idea of a dry toilet. We explained the idea of composting and using the compost and urine as a fertilizer for gardening. The fruits and vegetables produced could then be eaten by the families to prevent malnutrition or families could sell the products. We got the impression that people were interested in that idea as we answered many questions and that's why we would like to develop this idea further.

Introducing the idea of  dry toilets and urban gardening

Tomorrow at the Chamanculo festival we will introduce the idea to the locals, explain how the system of a dry toilet works and see and ask for their reactions. If we get positive feedback, a pilot project could be started in cooperation with ASSCODECHA.

Additionally in the last days we carried out interviews about water and sanitation. We did informal interviews and walks with several locals. Furthermore, we interviewed Teemu Seppälä from the Ministery of Science and Technology, Jean Barroca from World Bank, Jaana Oikarinen, a former volunteer at ASSCODECHA, who was involved in a dry toilet project in Swaziland and the local representative of the municipality for Chamanculo. We visited a primary school where we were a big attraction for the kids who wanted to touch your hair and walk with you. We could visit some classrooms, the toilets, and interview a teacher and the director of the school. It was a nice opportunity to see what the conditions in school are actually like and to get an impression in case of wanting to introduce the toilet idea to schools. There was definitely enough space for a big garden :)

We are looking forward to sharing thoughts and skills at the festival tomorrow and it will be good to see the reactions of potential users of the toilets... Let's see!

-Anja

Continuing with the Hackathon

After defining the problems, causes and root causes thanks to the problem tree technique on Monday, the second day of the Hackathon started with forming the different teams. There are five in total including our team with SGT students. As a warm up, we introduced the spaghetti structure to raise the team spirit. Mashmallows were replaced by banana pieces. The teams then continued with different exercises such as creating a comic story to carry on with their project and business plan.

First pitching with the QuickRep group

In parallel, we tried to define what could be our focus for the project. Visiting the homes in Chamanculo and seeing the ditch was very eye-opening. We got the feeling that steps to be taken are huge and it is very difficult to know where to start from. Should we focus on the social aspect, technical aspect, economical aspect, and so forth. Everything is interconnected, the whole system is complex and changing the mindset of locals seems very challenging. We discussed around the idea of piloting a dry toilet or cleaning the ditch. This latter idea didn't seem afterall very long-term efficient as we noticed that people would throw their rubbish anyway after a while. The last cleaning day organized by ASSCODECHA happened last Autumn on a early saturday morning. Few people joined though everybody is concerned. Though this not the first impression you would get from the street, locals we met mentioned that here people do care for their family, but not necessarly for their neighbours. There is apparently no much sense of community in the city. In a smaller scale such as Chamanculo, it's a bit different. People know each other and children play altogether. Trust remains a big issue as well.

Children in Chamanculo

We came to a conclusion that the actual process of setting up any new system or even repairing an old system would be more interesting for us than the actual  technical details. How would the locals react, how can they participate in the design process, be involved in the construction and maybe maintenance ? How could this system could be implemented, how does the maintenance system work, what is the business plan around it and so forth. 

We need to present our ideas to the other groups tomorrow which will be the last day of our Hackathon. Though it might not be our final scope for the project, we would like to carry on with the dry toilet idea and propose a business model and guidelines for that. This will a possibility for us to get actual feedback directly from the locals and other partners. We would then also hear what are the different ideas the groups came up with. 

The homes

Last week we had an opportunity to visit some local’s houses in Chamanculo. Three students from our English and IT course agreed to show us their homes, and an ASSCODECHA worker, Zego came to translate for us and also showed us his home. Today we went to look at the only ditch in Chamanculo and saw two more homes from the inside. We’ve filmed everything and got quite good material, I would say. Unfortunately it’s not possible to upload even pictures to this blog because of our lousy or expensive internet connections. Perhaps we can upload some from South Africa’s side next week or after we return to Finland.

Even though everything seems quite similar from the outside (corrugated iron (?) and concrete) the houses are actually very different from the inside in terms of facilities and furniture. The first house we visited was somewhat wealthy – they had quite nice furniture and the home inside didn’t look that different from a normal house. There were sport trophies and pictures on the shelves. Currently they had an improved latrine with an underground tank and a toilet bowl at the backyard, but they had plans of building an indoor toilet and had already got at least some of the equipment, like a new toilet bowl and a bathtub along with some pipes. The mother of the family happened to be one of the success stories of ASSCODECHA – she had taken a sewing course and had since been able to do many improvements on the house, send her kids to school, feed them well and make the initial investment in her son’s egg business. She also told that until recently she had been making hats for a South African company. She used to make 40 hats a day and earn 100€ a month (very little, but double the minimum wage – public doctors earn 350€). Now the hats are not manufactured in Mozambique any longer due to a government decision. She also showed us her wedding dress and other work, and talked a lot in Portuguese. Perhaps we can get it translated from the video some day. We were also served tea and some chips and sausage as the African hospitality mentality requires.

The next house was less comfortable, and their electricity didn’t work at the moment. The house was mostly built of corrugated iron sheets. There were four brothers living there with their mother in jail and father dead. They had also an improved latrine with an underground tank, but they had an issue with the water from the shower – it was flooding their backyard and not being absorbed in the soil. The boy we interviewed told that he had tried to get into the university but was not admitted. Now he wasn’t doing anything, but he hoped to become a policeman or work in the army.

Then we visited the house of a 23-year-old English course participant, who had one child and lived there with her mother, uncle, his children and grandmother. They had a traditional toilet, and the uncle told that it was the last hole they could dig – after that the toilet area would be full. They didn’t know what they would do then. There had been plans of building a sanitation block that they could’ve used too, but the owner of that land had not accepted the building. We interviewed the uncle, and he had been living there since the 80s. He had currently lost his job and was making some money by doing artist gigs. The women were also selling some coal, and his oldest son sends money when he can. He told that he needs at least 8000-10000 meticals (200-250€) a month to support his family. He also told that to improve his life he would need a better house. (We found this quite strange as he had lived in the same house already for decades without making any improvements.) But he was hopeful that through education his children would get a better life.

Today we saw two more houses with traditional latrines. The first one with 3 rooms accommodated 6 people and had minimal furniture, including beds. The second house was practically empty. There lived only one man in a four-room house, but he actually used only one room where he had a thin mattress, a piece of glass with some verses of the bible and his mobile phone. No cooking equipment, nothing else. He had a garden though, and he grew chili, pineapple and some other plants. He claimed to only water them, so we suppose the sandy soil isn’t hopeless for gardening (we also saw some tomatoes growing on a pile of sand and trash elsewhere).  He lived there alone as he had inherited the place from his family, who had all died during the 11 years he spent in prison in South Africa for hijacking cars in Johannesburg. It had been a bit of trouble getting the house back as there were others already living in it, and they broke everything when they left.

All the possessions of the man living alone next to the ditch.

His shower and toilet (under the smaller square rock).

Our main attraction today was the ditch of Chamanculo. It was built by a catholic organization after the big flood in 2000 to prevent such disasters in the future. However by now it had turned into a pool of sitting water and waste. It smelled and there were mosquitoes and algae breeding in it. The residents next to it told that they were tired of trying to clean it, as people would throw their waste in it anyway. Now it was completely blocked from several places.  It causes a lot of malaria and diarrhea, which kill children. The ditch was long and it was going through some people’s yards creating a big hazard for playing children. There were also a few broken water pipes that were all the time filling the ditch with fresh water. 

The ditch.

People saw the ditch as an extremely negative thing.  ASSCODECHA had previously organized some cleaning of the ditch, but that never helped for long. Now the locals are thinking about filling the whole thing with sand so it wouldn’t be there killing their children. The ditch was supposed to run to a bigger canal that eventually ends up in the river, but also the bigger canal seemed to be blocked from all the trash people had thrown there. People actually seem to go through some effort into getting their trash into the sewers, as they stuff it underneath the grids of the water harvesting holes everywhere where there are sewers in Maputo. In some places they have painted pictures around the grids saying ‘I don’t eat trash’. 

The bigger canal leading to the river.

We also encountered and interviewed a couple of guys collecting trash in wagons from people’s houses. They say they come everywhere twice a week to get all the rubbish except for broken glass bottles from the people. There are no public trash bins practically anywhere (and where there are, they are overflowing).

Interview with Zeca: the sanitation in Chamanculo

We had a long talk with Zeca Dimiter José Chioco, who has been involved with ASSCODECHA since it was founded – approximately 10 years. None of us doing the SGT course speak very well Portuguese, so we had to have someone to translate for us. 

Interview with Zeca Dimiter José Chioco at ASSCODECHA

Zeca explained to us that the problems of Chamanculo have their roots in poverty – the people who live there are poor, the municipality of Maputo is poor, the state is poor. Chamanculo’s population has been growing for decades and the buildings haven’t been planned. As a result the area is a labyrinth of houses very close to each other, and there are no ditches or sewers. There is neither space nor money to dig ditches or sewers. One of the serious consequences of this is that in the rain season the area often floods and the water gets into the houses very quickly. This makes normal activities, like sleeping on the floor, problematic. It actually doesn’t even have to rain, water pipe breakdowns cause minor flooding too. This is both due to not the best quality work in the first place and people’s amateur attempts to make their own connections to the water pipes in order to not having to pay for the water. And where there are sewers, people fill them with trash and cause flooding that way.

The streets are full of water after just a little rain.

Many people have a water pipe coming to their home, but not all. Previously there were public places to pick up water and the residents were charged after each month according to how much water was used, but many people refused to pay and said that others had used the water more. Then the water companies switched to a prepaid system. The public taps are since closed and people without a tap have to buy their water from the neighbors. The water companies are not interested in building a sewage system as they get their money from the clean water and not the waste water.  So the waste water is simply thrown on the street.

Most people in Chamanculo have a traditional latrine as they call it – a deep hole dug in the ground in the corner of the yard. A few have “improved latrines”, which means that they have a big tank underground and sometimes a toilet bowl, which is flushed with a bucket of water. Some people also have an indoor toilet – or at least we met one family who was going to build one and had got the materials.

Traditional latrines are dangerous for playing children, but more importantly combined with the flooding they cause regular epidemics of cholera and diarrhea. And as the hospitals suffer from insufficient supply of medicine, sometimes people die. 

Improved latrines are not filled with water when there is a flood, so they don’t spread diseases. They are however not a sustainable solution, as they can’t usually be emptied. After a time – maybe 5 years, maybe a decade – they will be full. 

ASSCODECHA had its first sanitation project in cooperation with the municipality of Maputo in 2001. They identified families using traditional latrines and built them improved latrines instead. A French organization called ESSOR continued with this project in 2007-2008. Due to the lack of sustainability ASSCODECHA went after the first project for a different solution, a sanitation block shared by 8 or 9 families. So far they have built two in cooperation with Taksvärkki. Also an Italian organization has built some sanitation blocks in Chamanculo according to ASSCODECHA’s idea. The sanitation blocks have toilets and showers, and the underground tank can be emptied. They also have a water tank on top to supply the water for showers and washing the toilets, but at least the other one has not been in use for a while due to a broken part that prevents the overflowing of the tank. They are collecting money from the families to repair it though. They are also thinking about opening an account for the families to save money for emptying the tank, but lack of trust makes it hard. ASSCODECHA does still provide councelling with the blocks, but the families should pay for the maintenance.  So far they have planned to build two more blocks. They also have a new idea of a shared tank that would have more plumbing so that people could have the toilets in their own yards instead of a shared block.

The shared blocks have caused some arguments and personal conflicts due to for example water bills, but the families are very happy about their sanitation blocks. Also the neighbors are happy as it no longer smells and they can eat outside. There is also a possibility to get prepaid water as well as prepaid electricity. According the Zeca it’s affordable for the families.

One of the sanitation blocks built by ASSCODECHA with Taksvärkki.

ASSCODECHA has also organized sanitation education projects with lessons, panel discussions and drama. They estimate having reached thousands of people, as they have had shows for example in marketplaces.

The waste is also a big problem in Chamanculo and in the whole of Maputo. The municipality have contracts with minor companies or associations that collect the waste from the houses with small carriages that fit in at least most of the alleys. They then bring the waste to big trash pools that are located in places accessible by big cars. The families are not respobsible of taking care of it, as they tend to send their children to do it and with them the trash usually doesn’t make it until the end. Also many adults are lazy and just leave the trash out of the sight of their home. However the pickup service is very irregular and families will have to dump their stinking garbage somewhere – usually not the garbage pool. The garbage collection is included in the tax of goods and doesn’t need to be paid separately.

There is no sorting of waste and very small recycling – no public at all. There are some companies that recycle bottles, metal or batteries.  

The big trash container that is taken away by a truck later on.

Chamanculo is a very traditional area and it’s located very close to the city center. During the colonialism the maids and workers lived there. The people who have lived there since have bigger places and they practically own the land, and they pay a symbolic rent to the government – something like 2 meticals (0.05€) a year. The people who came after the independence often rent the land from those who were there before. Although I’m not sure how accurate this information is, as Zeca had a long talk with his friends and didn’t seem very certain with answer. All the locals I have interviewed say that they own the land that they live on. There are no proper addresses or street names in Chamanculo, which of course makes it very hard to report problems or get help in emergencies – not that many places would be reachable by cars anyway. There are some plans to build bigger roads and a sewage system in the main part of Chamanculo, but nobody knows when it’ll happen. Making the streets wider would of course force some people to move out of their homes. 

Chamanculo is not a typical slum in the sense that some people want to live there even if they get an education and a good job. They’ll just improve their house. However these stories are quite uncommon. 

People have many children as there is a cultural belief of a rural origin that many children will equal wealth to the family. School is free of charge until the 7^th grade, but of course the uniforms and school material (excluding books) need to be bought and some families cannot even afford that. There are also often unofficial payments collected by the schools for guarding or cleaning – whether the money actually is used, it’s hard to say.

Start of the Hackathon about Water and Sanitation

Hello again from Maputo!


After an exciting first week with many different workshops prepared and executed by the BLOOM volunteers and a relaxing weekend in paradise Inhaca Island, we are back to work in Chamanculo.

The hackathon about water and sanitation started today. We have people from all different kinds of backgrounds: locals from Chamanculo, who actually face the problems we want to solve every day, students from the university of Maputo, who study IT or sanitation and are part of the groups to implement a possible solution and people from ASSCODECHA, who are involved in the solution finding process for many years already and are therefore experienced and able to give critical inputs. Also we, the SGT course participants, will form an own group, communicate with the other groups and are very curious about they defining the central problems and possible solutions.

We started with getting to know each other, defining the problems by creating problem trees, which actually turned out to be a quite hard task, because all causes, problems and consequences are linked and build more a network than an actual 'problem tree'. For sure the locals gave us a lot of input and ideas to work on! The last part of the day we learned more about different projects of World Bank realized with technologies and mobile applications around the world. In the end Jean introduced an idea about how to deal with the big problem of waste in Maputo using mobile applications, but also gather information via free calls and texts from locals. We had a very interesting first day of the hackathon and are curious about different and innovative solutions from the teams.

Brainstorming about problems

Development of our problem tree

Hackathon, first day

Our problem tree

Presentation from World Bank

Young people training dance in ASSCODECHA

-Anja

Blooming Africa

Today we (the group of Aalto University students blooming (ayy.fi/bloom) in Africa) spent our first day in the slum in Chamanculo. What a ride!

Our hostel, The Base, is located in Maputo about 7km away from Chamanculo. To get there we take the chapa, which is a small bus. The ride costs 7 meticals, which is about 20 cents in euros. The chapa ride itself is quite an experience with all the people and the quite hectic traffic. The drivers also tune the audio systems of their cars and make it well heard if they have a brand new stereo. Thankfully the music is really good, soul and stuff. I would recommend chapas to anybody traveling in Africa as they are cheap and a good way to get a little taste of living in urban Africa.

First day in Chamanculo

On the streets there is much trash as the public waste management is almost non-existant. Besides trash, guards, car-washers and salesmen are seen from the chapa window constantly. You can buy almost anything off the street. Today we have bought an extension cord in addition to the usual fruits and vegetables. Mangos are currently in season :)

I didn't really know what to expect of the slum we we're headed to. I had heard many warnings about violence, thievery and such in Africa and we had felt unsafe in some places during our trip. The slum Chamanculo felt strangely safe from the moment we entered it. Mostly this is because of the children. The cutest little things smile when they see you and if you have a camera they demand that you take a picture of them. Adorable! Ironically it seems that its safer to hold a camera out in the slum than on the streets of the city. 

We walked through the slum, encountering nothing but happy and positive reactions, to the base of ASSCODECHA - the NGO we are working with. This is the place where all our activities in Chamanculo take place. Today we had the first lessons in computer skills and English. In addition we played some Mölkky and ultimate and started filming a short movie in which the local people play the roles.

Children asking us to take pictures of them

Meeting with ASSCODECHA

Regarding sanitation there is a lot to be done - this we knew in advance. We talked with a worker of ASSCODECHA who has been working with sanitation in the area since 2001. We also had a look at the newly built sanitation blocks. Tomorrow we will go have a look at some homes and have a closer look at the living conditions in the slum. 

Coming to Mozambique certainly was a cultural shock, but man this place is awesome. One day down and feeling good!