Engineers Without Borders Australia wins $500,000 from Google Impact Challenge Australia
By Philippa Martens
23.10.2014
Somewhat unbelievable to us on dry land; but living alongside 15,000 other people on makeshift floating houses on a lake with no sewerage system is the norm for the inhabitants in the Phat Sanday floating community of Tonle Sap lake, in northern Cambodia. Limited access to safe, clean drinking water and a lack of improved sanitation facilities is a problem facing a lot of rural Cambodia, but the issue is even greater for a community living on water, oftentimes flooded throughout the monsoon season each year.
But an Australian Non Government Organisation (NGO) has created an innovative sanitation solution, and thanks to Google, hope to make that solution a reality by 2015. Engineers Without Borders Australia (EWB) have created a floating bio-digester toilet system to help improve sanitation conditions, provide a source of renewable energy and work towards eradicating infectious diseases in this impoverished community.
A bio-digester is an oxygen free tank, which digests organic material. It’s used to treat human waste on site. Once the organic material has decomposed without oxygen, it produces methane, which is then combusted, allowing it to be used for gas cooking and fertilisers.
Lizzie Brown, CEO of Engineers Without Borders Australia, says that “about two thirds of people in rural Cambodia practice open defecation and don’t have access to improved sanitation conditions which means that the incidence of disease is quite significant”. “We hadn’t secured a new funding partner for the project, so now with the funding from Google, we will be able to upscale the project more rapidly,” Ms Brown said. Their objective is to support the installation of 2,500 toilet systems reaching 15,000 people in Cambodia in the next 3 years. To do that, they will engage a network of local manufacturers and engineers to make and install the bio-digesters in Cambodia.
The production of biogas is not new technology, with anecdotal evidence mentioning its use dating back to the 10th Century BC in Assyria to heat bath water. The first digester was invented in Otago, New Zealand in the 1840s. The first bio-digester plant was built in a leper colony in Bombay, India in 1859. What is unique about Engineers Without Borders’ bio-digester toilet is that they have modified and reduced the size of the system to suit a community living on and in a lake. Furthermore, their system is manufactured in Cambodia, using local materials to Cambodia and local people to help install them, creating jobs and long-term sustainability for the project.
This ability to innovate technology and provide to a community in dire need caught the attention of the judges of the Google Impact Challenge Australia. The Challenge began a few years ago in the United States, the United Kingdom, India and Brazil. 2014 is the first year the Challenge has been in Australia. “Some of the past ideas include a mobile application that helps protect women from domestic violence and smart cameras for wildlife conservation,” says Shane Treeves, Google Australia’s Media and Communications spokesperson. Of the 300 entries into Australia’s Challenge, the list was narrowed down to ten finalists and Engineers Without Borders was one of the three winners to receive $500,000 from Google Australia. “What appealed to Google and the judges about Engineers Without Borders’ project was the use of innovation and technology to solve a really tough issue in Cambodia, with a large-scalable impact for a lot of people,” Mr Treeves said.
Engineers Without Borders Australia has enlisted the support of another Australian NGO, Live & Learn, to assist in overseeing the project in-country with volunteers and local expertise. Rob Hughes, a past EWB volunteer in Cambodia and now WASH (Water, Sanitation, Hygiene) program manager for Live & Learn said that “despite demonstrating a successful technology with a lot of potential, prior to winning the Google grant the project had been stalled due to a lack of funding. So it’s great Google have supported the work to not only build on the previous developments but to take them to the next level of being rolled out sustainably by local enterprises and organisations.”
Access to improved sanitation is one of the United Nations eight Millennium Development Goals, set out at a meeting of world leaders at the turn of the century with an objective to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity, and free the world from extreme poverty. According to the United Nations, over a quarter of the world’s population has gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, yet a billion people still resorted to open defecation. The 2014 Millennium Development Goal progress report states that between 1990 and 2012, almost 2 billion people gained access to an improved sanitation facility. However, in 2012, 2.5 billion people did not use an improved sanitation facility.
In 2014 alone, Cambodia has experienced severe drought and extreme flooding killing 45 people in different parts of the country. Flood prone communities such as Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia are more susceptible to the affects of changing weather patterns. “Changing weather patterns are resulting in more challenging environments in which we need to look at new types of sanitation solutions,” says Ms Brown. With high profile companies such as Google and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation providing funding for innovative sanitation solutions, EWB and Live & Learn said they hope to extend the project to other communities in need in South East Asia and the Pacific in the future.
Philippa Martens 