Energizing people and cities with hygienic toilets

Energizing people and cities with hygienic toilets

City of Lilongwe, Malawi

In Lilongwe, there are very few public toilets in the city, and those that exist are often unhygienic, forcing many residents to endure significant inconvenience. Sewerage infrastructure is insufficient, and introducing public toilets requires both upfront investment and ongoing costs to maintain sanitary conditions. However, the city government lacks the fiscal capacity to cover these expenses, resulting in a public health problem stemming from the shortage of public toilets.

In addition, the only form of public transportation within Lilongwe is minibuses. Routes are hard to understand and transfers are poorly coordinated, making travel highly inconvenient.

This QUEST aims to improve residents’ quality of life by installing managed, hygienic public toilets at public transport transfer points within the city.

• Select pilot sites within Lilongwe at multimodal, high-demand transport hubs (e.g., fuel stations, terminals, market areas); conduct on-site surveys of footfall, waiting times, and transfer behavior; deploy rental toilets to measure the quality and volume of excreta and estimate the quantity usable as fertilizer.
• Survey of minibus users—especially women and children—on perceived safety, barriers to use, and satisfaction, with findings fed back into service design and operations.
•  (If resource recovery is pursued) Partner matching and new partner development with private-sector companies engaged in resource recovery of human excreta (e.g., fertilizer production).

Note:We also welcome pilot proposals not listed above, as long as they contribute to solving the stated challenges.

Desired expertise: public health; urban transport planning; public toilet design and operations; fecal sludge management (FSM); O&M and business model design (including financial and fiscal management); gender-responsive approaches.

Note : We also accept achievements and expertise other than those listed above, as long as they contribute to solving the stated challenges.

• Facilitation of stakeholder consensus-building to advance the PoC (including the city government and informal-sector actors around transport hubs)
• Project formulation toward post-PoC implementation
• Access to human networks of JICA experts and JICA project practitioners (including NGOs)

Aichi（online pitch）・Fukuoka（online pitch）