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Wandering Jefe is the blog of Jeff Chapin. Jeff works at IDEO, and he went on sabbatical in January of this year to travel for a few months to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. There, he’s working with IDE, designing a low-cost latrine for use in rural settings.

He summarizes the problem here from a series of longer reports available here. I’ll summarize his summary.

Very few rural Cambodian homes have effective latrines. This problem is compounded by the fact that some NGOs have given away a very small number of very nice latrines in these rural areas. These latrines are of such quality that a standard Cambodian family could only afford one on the open market if the purchase was prioritized very highly. Such high prioritzation is rare, and so many Cambodians families end up neither purchasing cheap, functional latrines (which are not seen as desirable) nor desirable, expensive ones.

The design problem is this: “Build a desireable (sic), upgradeable latrine system that has an initial investment of 10-20USD and that can be upgraded over the years in subsequent, similar-sized investments.”

Since January, Jeff has detailed some of his research and ethnography, and he’s just moving into the ideation phase of the design. It’s been very much worth a read so far, and promises to get even more interesting in the coming months.