The Project Sammaan Toolkit
Quicksand began work on an innovative sanitation initiative, called Project Sammaan, in early 2012. Essentially a piloting-at-scale research project, the crux was to overhaul the community sanitation experience in India’s urban slums, with the cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack in Orissa as trial locations.
Beyond a purely infrastructural project, the initiative sought to experiment with and change the design of the facilities, the manner in which they were operated and maintained, the business models that allowed for economic viability, the support system at the municipal level, the policies that led to the construction of such facilities, and the branding and communications that supported them.
Given the scale of the project, its multi-year timeline, and the sheer number of stakeholders working on it, the grant supporting the initiative came with a clear mandate to create a toolkit that would share the experience and help inform others working in the sanitation space to help them roll out their programs in a more efficient manner. Obviously with Sammaan being a sanitation initiative, our focus was in framing our work in the context of that sector. However, in our experience, the challenge of capturing and sharing information in a constructive, usable manner is universal. How does one set about doing so, especially in an initiative with so many touch-points and stakeholders, and over such a lengthy time period? How does one determine what information is the most pertinent, and what is the best means in which that information can be conveyed to ensure maximum reach and impact? How do we ensure that information is not just conveyed, but also impacts practice of multiple stakeholders in a sustainable manner?
Fortunately in this experience we had the benefit of a blog and website that acted as a repository of project-related information and experiences so that they could capture experiences and learnings, in as close to real time as possible, supporting the development of our Sammaan toolkit: we had ample qualitative and quantitative information to parse. As such, the final deliverable gradually evolved beyond a traditional toolkit, into more of a guidebook: the various design tools used would be paired with anecdotal project references to provide context and better frame the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of our approach and processes. The challenge that remained was in determining the best medium, or media, in which to share our learnings and experience.
We explored many different avenues: a dedicated website, a combination of mixed media (i.e., films, web, and print), a minimalist approach of communicating learnings via posters, and even a scale model of one of the Sammaan facilities that featured project information as it pertained to specific aspects of the infrastructure itself. Each exploration came with its’ own positive and negative qualities, but we ultimately looked to our own experience with Sammaan, and some of the more frustrating challenges we faced, ending up in us deciding on a low-fidelity physical manifestation of the toolkit.
Our initial interest in having the toolkit be housed on some web-based platform was driven by the relative low-costs, as well as the massive reach potential that the Internet affords. But what about those that lack access to the Internet? It’s easy to assume that this would be a very small minority, and, accordingly, an acceptable loss of audience. However, the very municipal corporations in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack we worked with on Sammaan would be included in this minority: rare was it to find an official, irrespective of rank, that had access to a computer, let alone Internet access, and the wherewithal to use it. Nearly everything is paper-based, and most work is done conversationally.
This led us to develop a series of cards which would take users through design principles, how they directed specific work being done on the project, and the end results of each. The last of which being arguably the most important. Despite being anecdotal references that could be dismissed as unique to our context, we felt these were the most impactful given that they shared in an open and honest way the end result of our actions, both the good and the bad. The physical size of the cards (about double the size of a playing card) made them easy to carry and store. Interacting with them was made more interesting when done with others, capitalizing on the conversational nature of working with government representatives, and the simplicity of the design, along with the limited amount of text the medium afforded; using the cards felt more like playing a game than anything else. Ultimately, it was our day-to-day experience on Sammaan that informed the best approach for our toolkit; we applied the same user-centered design approach to the toolkit that we did in the creation of the entire project itself.
The project’s grant was provided by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of their “Reinvent the Toilet Initiative”. Unlike other programs under that umbrella, Sammaan did not seek to improve upon the interface (that is, the toilet itself) but rather to address a critical failpoint in India’s sanitation crisis. Slum dwellers are grossly underserved in terms of sanitation options, and the interventions that are provided, particularly community toilet blocks, fail to move the needle in increasing toilet usage and in providing safe, sanitary waste management and treatment. Oftentimes these facilities fall into disrepair, disuse, and ultimately become dysfunctional leaving an epidemiological time bomb in the communities while also denying them access to a basic human right. In turn, instances of open defecation only increase, which at least in part helps to frame why over 600 million Indians are forced into the practice.
Funding for community sanitation facilities is usually a mainstay in city sanitation plans. Knowing that more of the same, which is to say soon-to-be-dysfunctional, unvalued community facilities, was the option du jour for most municipalities, coming up with a better, sustainable alternative was the driving force behind Sammaan. Entering the project knowing that we were guinea pigs of sorts, in that our experience, good, bad, or otherwise, would help direct, and ideally ease, the efforts of colleagues in the sector made cataloging the experience as diligently as possible along the way that much easier.
Sanitation, like many development sectors, benefits far more from collaboration than it does from competition. The challenges faced, particularly in a country like India where the crisis is so severe, and the impact it has on end-users make it a daunting task. With both of these in mind, it’s encouraging to see organizations like Gates Foundation including knowledge-sharing in their grant mandates. I know that for us at Quicksand, if so many of the things we had to learn on the fly were already shared with us, we would have approached many things differently, and in so doing likely saved a lot of valuable time. This more than anything makes being able to share our experience with others that much more meaningful.
