Find A Loo: an app for sanitation governance

ABSTRACT

Billions are faced with poor sanitation in developing countries, forcing United Nations’ to miss sanitation targets over the years. This is mainly due to the poor condition of sanitation in the global-south comprising mostly developing countries. International and national organizations are mainly focused on building sanitation infrastructure to target the Sustainable Development Goal 6.2 (i.e., eradicating open defecation by 2030). But the service delivery in terms of monitoring & maintenance along with other governance issues is often overlooked in most cases. How can we arrange sustainable monitoring of a global sanitation community? In this paper, we discuss how information and communications technology (ICT) may be used to address sanitation governance. We outline the necessary governance criteria found in our field-observations and then explore ICT options to address these issues. We conceptualized and created ‘Find A Loo’ – a mobile application designed to be a ‘good-governance’ enabler. We tested this application with the help of System Usability Scale (SUS) and Potential Capability Scale (PCS), where it appeared as ‘Good’ with an ‘A Grade’ score, based on evaluators’ satisfaction on usability and capability. Overall the evaluation affirms that the application is not only useful and ready to use, but also capable of helping in addressing governance issues in sanitation. This work will be of interest to policy & decision-makers, researchers, service providers, NGOs and people working in the sanitation space. Further, such a system lends itself to analytics that helps optimize the performance of sanitation infrastructure.

KEYWORDS:

• Sanitation
• ICT
• governance
• toilet
• app
• Find A Loo

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Prof. Krithi Ramamritham and Dr Krishna Lala for their valuable comments, suggestions and assistance. We would like to thank Mr Jayant Solanki, Mr Sharad Mishra, Mr Sajal Narang and the members of ‘Smart Energy Informatics Lab (SEIL)’, ‘Embedded Real-Time Systems (ERTS) Lab’ and ‘Centre for Urban Science and Engineering’ of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay for their help and support. We also would like to thank various government officials and citizens for proving insights from their day-to-day experience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by ‘Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD)’, Government of India.

Notes on contributors

Rathin Biswas

Rathin Biswas is a PhD candidate at Centre for Urban Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay. His current research area is focused on Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WASH), governance, health, socio-technical aspects, policy and decision making.

Kavi Arya

Prof. Kavi Arya is a Professor in Department of Computer Science Engineering at IIT Bombay.He graduated from Oxford University where he worked in Programming Research Group. His current research is mainly focused on IoT, ICT, automation, embedded system, sanitation, governance, software technology, etc. Earlier he was a research scientist at IBM TJ Watson Research Center in New York, USA. He was also a research staff at Tata Research Development and Design Centre in Pune, India. He is the director of Chetana Pvt. Ltd. He is also associated with Mahindra & Mahindra as Tech. Advisor (CTO) to Vice Chairman/MD’s Office. He runs Embedded Real Time System (ERTS) Lab in IIT Bombay. He is the Principal Investigator of e-Yantra Project.

Vikrant Fernandes

Vikrant Fernandes is a Senior Project Technical Assistant at e-Yantra, IIT Bombay. He works on mobile application development and control system for autonomous drone.

Tushar Shah

Tushar Shah is a Senior Project Technical Assistant at e-Yantra, IIT Bombay. He works as a software engineer.