UKZN – RUNRES Community Engagement

Intro:

When members of a peri-urban neighbourhood on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal were faced with a growing human waste disposal crisis they turned to Professor Alfred Odindo of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) for assistance.

Members of the Blessed Agricultural Cooperative in the Vulindlela settlement needed help to get rid of waste piling up in their 15-year-old Ventilated Improved Pit (VIP) latrines.

‘The latrines were full, and the community was in need of a solution to empty them,’ said Odindo. ‘The people wanted to know how they could empty the pits and whether or not the contents could be processed into fertiliser products and sold or spread on their fields to improve soil fertility.’

Odindo, who is in UKZN’s School of Agricultural, Earth and Environmental Sciences (Discipline of Crop Science) and the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Research and Devlopement Centre (WASH R&D Centre)immediately prioritised getting better acquainted with the community and their challenges before applying for funding in 2018 from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation’s (SDC) Global Programme for Food Security.

‘A proposal was drafted with the help of Vulindlela residents and a group of international partners headed by Professor Johan Six of the Sustainable Agroecosystems Group at ETH Zürich. The partners included the Arba Minch University in Ethiopia and the International Institute of Tropical Agricultural in Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo and, in Kigali in Rwanda. Our proposal was chosen out of 96 submissions!’ he said.

The project – better known as ‘RUNRES: The rural-urban nexus: Establishing a nutrient loop to improve city region food system resilience’- is working with the Vulindlela community to implement innovations to improve sanitation and recycle human and organic waste in order to strengthen the resilience of smallholder agriculture in the community.

It has also provided an opportunity for specialist studies in a raft of disciplines including microbiology, agricultural economics, social sciences and engineering, while providing graduate and postdoctoral students with a practical and transdisciplinary space for co-learning.

RUNRES is both a transdisciplinary research and development activity engaging communities in co-designing safe, cost-effective and sociably acceptable waste management and sanitation innovations to establish a circular economy. Odindo and his team have had to adapt because of COVID-19 and are using electronic information and communication technologies to reach out to communities.

‘The transdisciplinary nature of the project has resulted in exciting collaboration between academia, together with the public and private sector as well as the civil society,’ he said.

Community buy-in was critical and established early on at the Vulindlela settlement and now also with the neighbouring Sobantu community who were added to the programme with the aim of broadening the impact and to guarantee the sustainability of the project. The project partnered with the WASH R&D Centre, Msunduzi Municipality, Umgeni Water, the departments of education, public works, and many other private organisations to form a transdisciplinary innovation team.
RUNRES is underpinned by a crucial co-funding concept – both the SDC and the project participants make cash and in-kind contributions to the implementation activities. Eventually the SDC’s contribution will become less and less while the role of the communities plus the private sector and their contributions and ownership will increase incrementally.

Odindo said growth and development potential linked to the project were identified in two ways – ‘outscaling’ and ‘upscaling’. ‘The first implies the project is rolled out in other neighbourhoods and districts whereas the second implies that some of the RUNRES principles, such as waste recycling, become government policy.

‘Our initial scaling is focused on working with the government and the private sector in South Africa. During the first piloting phase we will invest in pre-testing proposed recovery and re-use such as composting, biochar pyrolysis and decentralised wastewater treatment systems. The aim is to develop an understanding of what kind of data or information can convince the government and the private sector to invest in scaling the promising and successful innovations. For example data on the return on investment for the private sector, or data on the benefits of fertiliser import savings, public health benefits, crop production, or employment opportunities for the government,’ Odindo said.

As food systems are contributing to and being affected by, land degradation and biodiversity loss, the wide-scale adoption and roll-out of RUNRES, says Odindo, will result in changed consumption and food production patterns designed to operate within the boundaries of planetary sustainability.