Since 2007 the WASSUP (Water Amenities Sanitation Services Upgrading Program) team of community plumbers have worked tirelessly to repair and maintain 642 communal toilets, taps and drains in Extension 1 of the Diepsloot township. This program which not only brings working toilets to residents, also trains residents as community plumbers and generally provides some dignity to people using toilets. Through ongoing monitoring the project has demonstrated enormous water savings and is proven as a workable and scalable program for human settlements.
Research has proven that repairing and maintaining one toilet saves 4,000 litres of water per day. That’s 1.4 million of litres of water per year.
WASSUP has established solid partnerships and colleagues who support their work with materials and networks, however the team still needs cash, so we welcome you to our new adopt-a-toilet campaign. Adopting a toilet has the double benefit of not only providing good sanitation systems to local residents, it also contributes towards saving water, a precious resource.
What you get
When you #AdoptAToilet
$100
makes you a
#ProudToiletParent
for
1 toilet for 1 year
provides working ablutions for
39 households
saving
1.4 million litres of water.
For $100 you get
- Your logo chosen image/text painted by local signwriters on your adopted shit-house
- Direct communication with the WASSUP team
- 1 year of updates on your toilet activities:
- Before and after pictures
- What challenges your adopted toilet faces daily
- Regular photo updates on how your toilet is doing
- Your logo or image at the google map pin
- Videos from your toilet with comments from people that use the facility
If you adopt more than one toilet:
- Your get your own personal live digital tour of your adopted toilets and surrounds plus video discussion with residents and WASSUP.
Make A Contribution
#AdoptAToilet Today
- 1 Ablution
- 39 Households
- 1.4 million litres of water saved per year
- 5 Ablutions
- 195 Households
- 7 million litres of water saved per year
- 10 Ablutions
- 390 Households
- 14 million litres of water saved per year
- ? Ablutions
- times 39 Households
- times 1.4 million litres of water saved per year
More Information
Here are some great initiatives of this project:
JUST URBAN IMAGINARIES PAPER & PRESENTATION
The Human Face of Faeces
We all, as a rule, hate shitting.
We all, as a rule, hate vomiting.
Ask any woman, and she will most likely say she hates bleeding.
Pissing, we can tolerate… only barely… and that’s only if the toilet seat isn’t too cold in winter.
Just urban spaces are spaces where people have access to the amenities and services they need to be able to live in dignity and to go about their lives in a comfortable, accessible and functionable way. We believe that a just urban space is where people can conduct basic human bodily functions, i.e. walk into the toilet with dignity, do their business, and walk out of the toilet with dignity.
RESEARCH REPORT
Water Loss & Sewerage Leaks, Environmental & Health Crisis (2019)
In March 2019 we released a report following over 10 years of operations and 4 years of water metre readings. The work has proven that that 1,000,000,000 litres of water (yes that’s 1 billion litres) are lost due to lack of repairs & maintenance in one single extension of Diepsloot, costing the City 20million ZAR per year to pay for the water. But the WASSUP Diepsloot proven community program costs R1,300,000 per year to stop all that water loss.
COMMUNITY PLUMBING CHALLENGE
Through 2016–17 WASSUP and Sticky partnered with IWSH (the International Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Foundation) for the pilot Diepsloot #CommPlumbing Challenge. This program brought together four country teams – plumbers, engineers, architects and construction tradespeople from India, USA, Australia and South Africa – to design, build and then install new ablution facilities better suited to conditions in Diepsloot’s Extension 1. What first started as a competition, finished as a collaboration… because when our toilets work, everybody wins!
WASSUP Diepsloot Clients, colleagues and collaborators:
The list of fabulous partners on this project is extensive, please see the report on page 7 for a full list – we are grateful to each and every one of them. But because web attention is limited we have short-listed below our current partners on this adopt a toilet campaign: