Our initiative is promoting the human right approach to water and sanitation for urban poor tenants by giving them an opportunity to demand their rights from absentee landlords.Our main potential customers are sanitation regulators however other public and private institutions are potentials too. The initiative will largely benefit urban poor tenants who do not have a voice towards improving sanitation situation of onsite facilities. It will also empower practitioners of manual emptying who make their living through illegal emptying processes.It is also providing a pathway to the regulators in implementing sanitation regulations. Our approach entails mapping toilets into developed mobile application and collection of contact information of the tenants, landlords and possibly manual emptiers in partnership with a regulator; who in this case is a water utility company/public health department into a dashboard platform. Through the application a tenants reports a full toilet by sending information into the dashboard, which also sends a notification to their landlord to empty the toilet. If the landlord does not show a commitment of emptying a toilet, the regulator under the public health policy guidelines can issue a notice to the landlord and with no further response take up a legal mandate suitable to enhance toilet emptying. Possible actions include authorizing tenants to collect rent and use it to empty the full toilet that is a norm in urban poor areas or charge the landlord in court under the municipal by laws. The manual emptiers will be brought on board to provide emptying service equally tracked on where they will dispose the sludge. The initiative will provide real time spatial data to the regulators for enforcement and leveraging decision-making. It will also aid in monitoring and evaluating the advancement of urban poor rights to a safe sanitation. We are also actualizingour dream of transforming the sanitation data ecosystems to be more cohesive and responsive, thus enhance and leverage sanitation decision making.
N/B, we have developed a video of our initiativeand will be very willing to submit it to the panel.
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