Testing Toilets in Accra

Prototype, test, refine, repeat.

After a long (very long) journey we’re excited to say we’ve made it safely, toilets and all.

We brought with us 5 toilet prototypes from San Francisco to Kumasi – a mixture of some off-the-shelf portable toilets and some that we designed and built back in California. We left them with families here in Kumasi to test. We’ll be returning in two days to empty and clean the toilets and get the families’ feedback – but initial reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. The elderly, in particular, are excited about the possibility of not walking to the public toilets everyday but we’re excited to see how the whole family feels about them after a couple days.

After we get a better sense of how the families use the toilets, we’ll modify them and give them to new families, repeating the process and testing as many ideas as we can in the two weeks we’re here in Kumasi.

Read more from the Ghanasan Team at: http://ghanasan.wordpress.com

Ghanasan was a collaborative project between IDEO, Unilever and Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor to explore sanitation issues in Ghana. It pursued sustainable sanitation concepts for poor urban areas like Kumasi, the nation’s second-largest city, with a population of more than 1.5 million people.