Don’t take away their toilets
Are social constraints limiting the implementation of your sustainability agenda? Here are some pragmatic lessons from UNICEF’s travail in a Niger Delta community.
For a greater part of 2016 and 2017, I had a short stint in the Nigerian Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector. As an engineer, with oil prices down and most oil companies not recruiting non-core professionals, I wanted to know if the WASH sector was worth investing my time and resources. So, I was open-minded, eager to learn all I could. At that time, I had the opportunity to work with a United Nations Children Funds (UNICEF) WASH Consultant in Rivers State, Nigeria. UNICEF’s mission was to accelerate access to safe water and better sanitation for rural dwellers in Akuku-Toru Local Government Council of Rivers State, Nigeria.
An engineering challenge?
In retrospect, a clear lesson has been that Nigeria’s water and sanitation problems are very complex and nuanced. A good example is the provision of safe drinking water. There are currently limited safe and affordable alternatives to groundwater abstraction in Nigeria. According to the World Bank, access to piped water on premises in urban areas declined from 32 per cent in 1990 to 7 per cent in 2015. In reality, the population growth rate is simply outpacing the infrastructure renewal and public investment in the water sector. The last multi-indicator cluster survey indicates that groundwater is the main source of water supply for close to 60 million Nigerians, accounting for 50% of the improved drinking water sources available in the country. With an additional 30 million people expected to be reached if the country is to meet its Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) target, there is a huge need to either debottleneck the groundwater abstraction process or identify cheaper decentralised solutions.
The example above might sound like a simple engineering problem when viewed in isolation. However, when all the interplaying social, economic, political and geographical factors are taken into account, it becomes obvious that there are no easy solutions to problems like this. A perfect case study to illustrate this is UNICEF’s struggles to improve access to safe water and sanitation in Akuku Toru, a rural community in Rivers State, Nigeria.
Akuku Toru, like most riverine communities in the Niger Delta, did not have a reliable source of drinking water. Their surface water suffers from pollution by oil and gas activities, so their options were limited to packaged water from vendors and probably rainwater. Because of the high water table, they could not deploy a robust and conventional faecal sludge management system like the septic tank for fear of groundwater contamination. Neither could they count on groundwater abstraction like most communities across the country.
On paper, this presents an excellent case study for an environmental engineering graduate programme. But in reality, unfolding events showed that despite the multi-million dollars spent by UNICEF and other development partners like the European Union, there was no solution in sight. The terms of reference of a UNICEF advertisement in 2018 seeking an international consultant to manage the Niger Delta highlights common challenges organisations seeking to engineer change can face.
A wicked problem
Accelerating water access and sanitation in a low-income country is not just an engineering problem; it has several elements of wicked problems, a concept developed by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973. Wicked problems refer to a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems. Typical wicked problems today include sustainability, climate change, provision of healthcare services. Some of the characteristics of wicked problems identified by Horst Rittel are outlined below.
Characteristics of Wicked Problems:
Wicked problems have no definitive formulation. The problem of poverty in Texas is grossly similar but discretely different from poverty in Nairobi, so no practical characteristics describe “poverty.”
It is hard, maybe impossible, to measure or claim success with wicked problems because they bleed into one another, unlike the boundaries of traditional design problems that can be articulated or defined.
Solutions to wicked problems can be only good or bad, not true or false. There is no idealised end state to arrive at, and so approaches to wicked problems should be tractable ways to improve a situation rather than solve it.
There is no template to follow when tackling a wicked problem, although history may provide a guide.
There is always more than one explanation for a wicked problem, with the appropriateness of the explanation depending greatly on the individual perspective of the designer.
Every wicked problem is a symptom of another problem. The interconnected quality of socio-economic-political systems illustrates how, for example, a change in education will cause new behaviour in open defecation.
No mitigation strategy for a wicked problem has a definitive scientific test because humans invented wicked problems, and science exists to understand natural phenomena.
Most times, offering a “solution” to a wicked problem is a “one-shot” design effort because a significant intervention changes the design space enough to minimise the ability for trial and error.
Every wicked problem is unique.
Source: Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving. Jon Kolko, Austin Center for Design, 2012
The problem of Akuku Toru mirrors most if not all of the characteristics of wicked problems. For example, open defecation, an indicator of poor sanitation, is a symptom of other wicked problems like poverty, inequality, poor education, policy failure, high population growth rate, which are all wicked problems on their own. In addition, just like most wicked problems, there are no absolute solutions to water and sanitation problems. Nevertheless, within a geographical or cultural context, a good or bad solution can be identified. To illustrate this, recall that UNICEF has a good pedigree in the WASH domain. They were, therefore, not new to complex challenges like the one highlighted above. However, they failed to achieve their aim in the community.
It is not unusual for experts to fail when dealing with complex problems. According to McKinsey and Co, previous successes can lead to pattern-recognition biases such as confirmation bias. This type of bias can make the decision-maker transfer what worked in an entirely different scenario to a new scenario without gathering sufficient data about the present scenario. This was the case of UNICEF’s travail in Akuku Toru. The composting toilet they recommended has had a history of success in several communities around the world. However, it was not a socially acceptable solution in the community.
Finally, the lack of clarity in problem formulation meant both UNICEF and the community saw and defined the problem differently. UNICEF saw it as a case of tackling open defecation and protecting groundwater. They recognised the constraints posed by the terrain and limited access to finance, therefore, proposed innovative technologies that could achieve the set objectives. On the other hand, the community dwellers recognised the safety concerns posed by their current solution-the pier latrines, especially to the most vulnerable people such as children and the elderly. However, from the onset, they never saw open defecation as a problem in their community. This is because indiscriminate defecation, especially close to their homes, was completely unacceptable culturally. So, they were appalled by a celebrated design like the composting toilet that required them to have toilets close to their compounds. Yet, they never voiced their disappointment openly as there were incentives for cooperation. But what was clear to me as an independent observer was that the arrangement was not sustainable.
Lessons and recommendations
There are several lessons I believe sustainability analysts, environmental consultants or decision-makers can learn from this. But the key lesson is this-for sustainability projects to endure, consultants must ensure the social dynamics of the project are well balanced against the usual environmental and economic factors driving the project. In other words, precise attention must be given to ensure that socially acceptable technologies or solutions are proposed. To achieve this, I recommend the following strategies.
Learn to recognise wicked problems, and it’s implications
Climate change, sustainability and indeed most environmental issues are wicked problems. Consultants must distinctively understand that they cannot divorce these problems from the unique socio-political contexts where they are found. Most times, they are usually nuanced cultural or religious dispositions of the people, but they can also be the attitude of the workers and suppliers in the community. So, consultants must identify and understand the unique factors that can affect their proposed solution rather than being technology-focused.
Without a robust framework, it is very common for decision-makers confronting wicked problems to encounter biases in their work as earlier pointed out. McKinsey and Co have recommended several pragmatic approaches for debiasing when confronting business problems. I favour having an independent reviewer play the devil’s advocate. This approach will help the proponents identify grey areas where their prior expertise, methodology or context might have created a blind spot. In addition, it is also cheaper. I also recommend working with a diverse team in terms of skill and cultural background. Overall, it is best to be open-minded when receiving feedback from the end-users. Some of the best clues to solve several complex problems have been known to come from outsiders.
Find points of convergence in the problem definition
A well-cited characteristic of wicked problems is the lack of clear boundaries in the problem definition and formulation. This problem can manifest in several ways and might go undetected till the project implementation phase. In Akuku Toru, it became obvious to me after two separate meetings with the Amayanabo (the traditional ruler) and the youth leader of the community that the people were disappointed with the proposed solution. Further investigation showed open defecation was never their chief concern. It appeared that my boss and her superiors were silently aware that strong cultural ties prohibited open defecation. From the onset, all parties were aware of risks associated with the pier latrines. For the community, perhaps securing their pier latrines so that the most vulnerable people in the community, such as children and the elderly, could go there at night seemed more sensible. To UNICEF, however, the threat from the pier latrines were not just security issues but the contamination of food in the face of a flood.
But whether the perceived risks arose from security threats or fear of an impending epidemic, beginning with a shared concern could have provided a better premise for a consensus solution. Points of convergence can also help decision-makers identify critical success factors of the project.
Understand the social constraints
Talking of critical success factors, an early-stage assessment of most sustainability project would normally put cost and technical expertise ahead of other considerations. However, a counter-intuitive approach is to realize that the hardest problems to solve eventually are seldom engineering or cost-related as earlier feared, but mostly the social related ones. So, it is wise to understand the scope of your problem and define what is adjustable and what is not. You will most likely find out that engineering and cost constraints can be reasonably adjusted or new alternatives sought. But these social factors, “social constraints” are not. According to the American Society for Engineering Education, social constraints are patterns of behaviour that hinder the implementation of engineering projects. Social constraints can include formal practices such as government regulations or informal norms, including cultural preferences.
Frequently, advocacy campaigns are used to influence social behaviour. Advocacy campaigns are important and can help to ramp up support for a policy or educate people. But it must never be used to showcase the value proposition of an engineering project.
As a rule of thumb, if an engineering solution requires a lot of advocacy to demonstrate its value proposition to the community, it is the wrong solution in that context.
Innovate around already existing local solutions
Decision-makers must realise that climate change will seldom create new local problems. Rather, it will accentuate existing ones. For example, a high land would not suddenly become vulnerable to flooding because of climate change. Rather, a flood-prone region would likely witness more floods. In the same vein, an area susceptible to drought, like the Chad basin, would become more vulnerable than the Amazon or a Mangrove forest.
The subtle implication of this is that the residents would already have some existing solutions to the problems in their community. It is very important not to ignore these local solutions. In Akuku Toru, the pier latrine was the existing solution. No doubt, it had a lot of limitation. But it had a lot of social acceptance, which turned out to be a critical success factor in implementing the alternative. The lesson here is rather than proposing wholesale changes; a less risky and pragmatic approach is to innovate around existing ones. Innovating around the pier latrines or finding ways to mitigate the risks it posed would have eased most of UNICEF and society’s concerns.
No doubt, doing this may not have completely turned the case into an engineering problem, but it could have ensured that the social constraints that undermined the project were not ignored. In retrospect, the situation has scope for deploying other onsite technologies such as breathable membranes and constructed wetlands. The wide scope of engineering solutions that could be applied shows the failure was not due to technical limitations. However, what I find intriguing is that experts are still very keen to recommend solutions meant to protect groundwater rather than seek to identify ways to improve the pier latrines whenever this case is mentioned. This is wrong. Solutions can not be preferred in isolation without giving due consideration to society's local challenges and realities.
So, when the temptation to propose new solutions arises, a good way to start might be to ask how engineering can improve the existing local solution.
Manage expectations wisely by taking advantage of trends
It could sound very naïve to question why the community dwellers did not publicly raise their concerns about the proposed solution. But to identify why most projects in poor communities never achieve their entire lifecycle, it is important to answer that question. First and foremost, recognise that most projects in poor communities are done to respond to wicked problems. As earlier pointed out, wicked problems are offshoots of wider societal issues like poverty. So, to get people’s attention, it is most likely that meetings will be incentivised. Soon, the attendees learn to look forward to the meeting not because of the new insight to be drawn but due to the incentives they expect. This is why it is often hard to adopt a preventive approach to managing environmental problems in most low-income countries.
Nevertheless, deferring to launch a project till after a major catastrophe or humanitarian crises could cost many lives. I recommend a strategic approach to project launch like launching community-based projects when there is a clear trend to ride. This way, everyone shares the same urgency and sense of mission. Also, it would be much easier to get objective feedback and contribution to the project.
Conclusion
With climate change now a hot topic in the public policy arena, more sustainability projects targeting poor communities are expected. These projects will fail not because of technical know-how or project cost. They would mostly fail due to a lack of an understanding of the social dynamics of the community where the project will be sited or executed. It is, therefore, important for decision-makers to prioritize social issues at the early stages of the project. I expect these five steps to help you propose and execute projects that would have wide social acceptance.
