Mosan: Combining Circularity and Participatory Design to Address Sanitation in Low-Income Communities

The health and environmental impact of unsafe sanitation affects more than half of the world’s population. The lack of access to safe sanitation affects disproportionately rural populations in low- and middle-income countries, where progress is also shown to be slower. The sheer scale of the problem, combined with the variability of climate, geographies, and socioeconomic conditions, requires a variety of adaptable, scalable, centralized, and decentralized solutions working cohesively. This paper presents the case of Mosan, an off-grid, market-based sanitation solution, in order to display how such sanitation approaches can contribute to bridge this gap by addressing the communities most at risk. Mosan is a decentralized, circular sanitation solution encompassing the whole sanitation chain from containment, collection, transport, transformation, and reuse. Focused on community-scale systems, Mosan is applying participatory design principles and co-creation to enable community engagement, raise awareness, trigger creativity, and support local innovation.