Capacity Building for Ecological Sanitation (Ecosan Resource Material)

Ecological sanitation is a new paradigm in sanitation that recognises human excreta and water from households not as a waste but as resources that can be recovered, treated, where necessary, and safely used again.

Ecological sanitation systems offer a range of low cost to high tech sanitation options which are hygienically safe, comfortable to use, environmentally friendly and often more economic than conventional systems. In addition, they ideally enable a complete recovery of nutrients in household wastewater and their reuse in agriculture. In this way, they help preserve soil fertility and safeguard long-term food security, whilst minimising the consumption and pollution of water resources.

However, the knowledge available on ecological sanitation still needs to be further developed, and the current lack of capacity is considered a crucial limiting factor in meeting the increased demand for the implementation of ecological sanitation.

The participants at a side-event on "Ecological Sanitation Capacity Building" held during the 3rd International Ecological Sanitation Conference in Durban, South Africa (24 May, 2005) therefore recommended the establishment of an international network of interested organisations and training institutions, in order to accelerate the formation of a capacity building initiative for ecosan.

As a contribution to this initiative, GTZ together with several other organisations has collected, assembled and made available published material relevant for education and training purposes on this ecosan resource CD-ROM. The CD-ROM has been produced in parallel to the UNESCO-GTZ publication “Capacity building for ecological sanitation - concepts for ecologically sustainable sanitation in formal and continuing education", which is available in section A of the CD-ROM.

This CD-ROM should be of use to teachers interested in developing their own teaching material for formal and continuing education and vocational training, to those planning awareness raising activities, and to those who need educational material during the planning and implementation of an ecosan project. To provide inspiration for the development of your own ecological sanitation capacity building activities, a range of of examples of ecological sanitation syllabi, workshop contents and awareness raising presentations are included along with the most relevant existing basic literature on ecosan.

This CD-ROM is seen as the core of the current ecological sanitation knowledge base, and will be used as a starting point for a web-site on education and training material for ecological sanitation capacity building which will be further developed as a support to the international ecosan capacity building initiative.