Participatory design is a topic discussed a lot among architects trying to design socially inclusive and appropriate buildings and spaces. Participatory design turns architects into facilitators who guide the design process without influencing, trying to draw the knowledge out of the users who know best how the spaces they need should be designed. The role of the architect is to sit back and raise the confidence of the people so they can come up with their own solutions and express their needs and priorities. The most vulnerable people often don’t have the power to express themselves, and participatory design can be a way to gives these people a voice. A few months ago I learned more about participatory design in action when I took part in a two-week in-situ studio organized by the Swedish member organization of Architecture Sans Frontières (ASF) in Guinea-Bissau.
The in-situ studio was part of Challenging Practice, a learning program developed by ASF for built environment professionals who wish to learn more about inclusive and sustainable urban development. While the course usually focuses on urban issues, in Guinea-Bissau we worked in a rural setting instead. The focus was on designing inclusive and child-friendly water and sanitation facilities in schools, working together with the WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) section of UNICEF Guinea-Bissau. UNICEF builds infrastructure for schools, paying for materials that communities could not afford, but their wish is that the community also invests something instead of just being receivers. In this context, participatory design also becomes a tool for finding the answer to how communities can contribute.
UNICEF and WASH in Guinea-Bissau
Our main partner throughout the studio was the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, that works with health, nutrition, education and WASH issues in Guinea-Bissau. The main challenges with education in Guinea-Bissau is that children often start school late and drop out early. Starting school late is particularly problematic for girls who end up dropping out of school after just a few years due to early marriage. UNICEF’s 6-6 campaign in Guinea-Bissau aims to get children to start school at age six and to finish at least six years of basic education.
Guinea-Bissau is a country prone to epidemics of cholera and other diseases spread by poor hygiene. UNICEF’s WASH section promotes good hygiene and campaigns to end open defecation in Guinea-Bissau, and the approach is to change the behavior of communities through schools. Education about hygiene is important, but so is building quality water and sanitation infrastructure in schools, including latrines, water access points and hand washing stations. Inclusive and gender-separated sanitation facilities with access to water are particularly important for girls, many of whom drop out from school when they start menstruating and don’t feel comfortable using school toilets.
A lot of buildings built by UNICEF deteriorate fast due to poor maintenance. The main reasons behind this are lack of finances, lack of knowledge on how to maintain, lack of ownership, and poor quality of construction. Infrastructure built by UNICEF in Guinea-Bissau sometimes doesn’t even last one year – because someone steals the taps, the flush breaks because people don’t know how to use it, or for various other reasons. Participatory design can help avoid these problems by making sure the community understands both the buildings and their responsibilities in taking care of them.
UNICEF dry school latrine for Guinea-Bissau
One of our tasks was to evaluate a new latrine design UNICEF had recently built in ten schools in the Bafatá Region of Guinea-Bissau. This design is a dry composting latrine where the idea is that the compost can be used as fertilizer. This is a new idea in Guinea-Bissau and it was clear that the compost was not being used in the schools we visited, but it is possible this will change over time. The latrine is designed to be child-friendly and inclusive, and one of the most important features of the design is a larger accessible toilet for children with disabilities. This toilet also has a water tap specially for menstruating girls, while in the other toilets water has to be brought in with a bucket to lower building costs.
Using local materials is a way to lower costs and to make buildings more easy for rural communities to maintain. Parts of UNICEF’s new latrines are built with bamboo, a material that is easily available in the Bafatá Region and which the locals can easily find and work with themselves if the bamboo needs maintenance. The bamboo is attached to the rest of the structure in a way that makes it possible to remove and replace it easily. The bamboo is also treated with gasoline in order to make it more durable and to protect it from insects. However, some of the details aiming to reduce the need for maintenance – including the attachment of the bamboo – had not been done correctly, so more supervision would have been necessary during the construction.
How the new latrines were being used was interesting to observe. In the first school the toilets were locked when we arrived and it seems like this is always the case. Students have to ask their teacher for a key to use the toilets, and it was unclear how often this actually happens as the toilets seemed unusually clean. UNICEF has encountered a problem in other schools with teachers keeping latrines locked so that they are clean when UNICEF comes to inspect. It also seemed possible that the teachers were keeping the toilets locked to keep them clean for themselves, especially the larger toilet meant for the disabled. In the second school the toilets looked more used, but gender separation didn’t seem to be working, which is problematic because it can lead to older girls avoiding the latrines and even the school, especially during menstruation.
Analysis through participatory design
For our design task we worked in two villages near Farim in northern Guinea-Bissau: Binta and Jumbembem. In these villages UNICEF had plans to build new water and sanitation infrastructure for the school – more specifically latrines, a hand washing station and a solar pump. I was part of the group working in Binta, a village with a central location with students coming from 10 surrounding villages, which makes it possible to reach and impact a lot of people.
UNICEF had never worked in these villages before and our first task was to use participatory design to find out what the community thinks of the school. To find out the answer we used different methods, such as semi-structured interviews with school and community leaders and walking and talking around the school and the village with groups of children and adults. Another method we used was mapping with post-its by walking around the school with students and teachers and asking them to designate positive and negative elements of the school with Post-its of different colors.
In Binta there are only two classrooms for more than 300 students in grades 1 to 6. This is clearly not enough and the school has tried to solve this problem by building temporary classrooms out of bamboo and palm leaves that need to be rebuilt every year. A new building with two additional classrooms was under construction, but it had been funded by a politician fishing for votes and the funding had suddenly stopped so it was unsure if the building would be finished.
School latrines had been built in 2012 at the same time as the two classrooms. The girls’ latrine had recently been destroyed by a fallen tree, and so everyone now used the boys’ latrine, which was too small and in bad condition. The toilets were dark, the locks didn’t work and there was offensive graffiti on the walls. There is no water directly by the latrine and students need to use buckets to fetch water from the school’s well. Many students said they preferred to use the bush instead, keeping up the practice of open defecation that is problematic for spreading diseases like cholera.
Despite all the problems with the latrines, the students still preferred them over the bathrooms they had at home. Typical bathrooms in the village are roofless spaces fenced off with palm leaves or other similar materials that don’t last long. It was clear that everyone preferred the concrete structure of the school latrines that felt more safe and private and didn’t need to be replaced every year.
Revised school latrine design
The philosophy behind participatory design is that users – in this case the students of the school – have the answers to how the spaces should be designed. After talking and mapping with different groups – boys, girls, teachers – we moved on to the new design and asked the students to draw their ideal toilet. Afterwards we discussed the drawings with the students to better understand what they meant and analysed the drawings from our professional point of views as architects. The workshop was limited by the students’ tendency to draw similar elements that they had all learned to draw, but from the drawings it was clear that the students wanted latrines with water, light and colors.
Based on these workshops we developed a revised design of the UNICEF dry latrine. It was clear that water should be made a higher priority and so the revised design includes a tap in each toilet. In the design of the latrine block we also added a second larger toilet that the teachers can lock and keep clean for themselves, while keeping another large toilet open for disabled students. This teachers’ toilet is in the same block as the students’ toilets, and the there is an outer gate that can be locked at night and on weekends. Apart from this outer gate, only the teachers’ toilet can be locked from the outside, and the idea is that the teachers will unlock the main gate in the morning to use their own toilet and afterwards the gate and the other toilets inside the block will remain open for the students to use without asking for a key.
In order to find money for these changes, we reduced the amount of concrete needed. We reduced the height of the latrines and made the top part more open for light and ventilation. We also increased the size of the bamboo part, although we recognized the fact that in Binta bamboo is not as easily available as in Bafatá. We discussed with a local mason about the possibility of using mangrove wood instead as it is readily available.
Placement of the latrines was another design aspect we worked with in a participatory way by asking students to weigh different options of how the boys’ and girls’ latrines could be placed in relation to one another. Younger students wanted the latrines close to each other while the older ones wanted them further away. We also used a rope to place the latrines on the site in 1:1 scale together with the students. We placed special focus on the opinion of teenage girls for whom the latrines and privacy are especially important.
We also proposed that UNICEF increases local participation during the construction of the latrines. One way would be to hire more local workers, which would benefit the locals economically and also improve their understanding of the construction so they know better how to maintain the latrines. Or the locals could show more commitment by providing free labor, as they were doing for the construction of the new classrooms. Another proposal was to have a painting workshop with the students to paint the latrines or a part of the latrines so that they would feel more ownership of the latrines and take better care of them. Girls and boys would paint the latrines with different motifs and this could enhance the gender separation and hence make the latrines more comfortable for the girls. This painting would need to be redone every few years as the paint deteriorates, but in this time the students of the school would also change.
WASH in schools and community development
UNICEF and other NGOs do what they can with the money they have, one step at a time. In this case, there was only enough money for the school’s sanitation facilities, but it is important to keep in mind the big picture and how everything is connected. For this reason we also discussed and had workshops with different community members, including the women’s horticultural association, builders and village leaders. Working with the locals in this way made it clear that the locals had many challenges they saw as more important than school latrines.
We wanted to understand the local economy. Guinea-Bissau is a major exporter of cashew nuts and it has been estimated that 80% of the country’s population depends directly on cashew nuts cultivation for subsistence. Cashew nuts and other types of agriculture are also a main source of income in Binta. One problem is that most people grow and sell the same crops which lowers prices and makes it harder to find buyers, and one of the first things the local women asked us for was help with selling their produce. Binta was an important port town during the Portuguese colonial period, but now the locals need to travel long distances, often on foot, to be able to sell their produce, except during Binta’s Thursday market. Agricultural machines and storage for crops were also something the community needed.
Even with the school there were clearly bigger issues than the latrines. One was of course the insufficient number of classrooms, but another issue was that the school had actually not been running for several months because the teachers were on strike. Even when the school is running normally, teachers are absent a lot because some live in other villages and often have problems with their motorbikes or some other reason they can’t make it to Binta. We also saw a registry of students and one thing that was clear was that there was a huge drop in the number of girls between grades 1 and 6. Many children also start school very late and one reason for this could be that there is no kindergarten in Binta.
Water was another issue linked to the school. There is a covered well with a hand pump at the school and this well has the only potable water in the village. As a result, many women come fetch water from the school well, and teachers say they are disturbed by the noise. UNICEF has plans to build a solar pump for the school and when doing this they can also place one water access point for the villagers. Finding a good placement for this water point is important for both the school and the village.
The solar pump can also power up to five lights, and in one participatory workshop our group asked community members where these lights and the water access point should be placed. During a similar workshop we asked how the school surroundings could be further improved. Participants were given post-its with different functions – such as storage, kindergarten, latrines, school garden, shadow, bench – and asked to place them on a map of the school surroundings. They had to prioritize and could only pic a few functions they felt were most needed.
Empowering the community can also help the school, for example by enabling the community to collect funds that can be used to maintain the school. This was the case in another school we visited where the community raised money for the school by working on cashew nut farms. In Binta, one of our proposals was a school garden that could create funds and food for the school, and the garden could even be used to grow bamboo to sell and to maintain the latrines. A larger community garden with water provided by the solar pump could benefit the whole community. Combining a school garden and a community garden could bring the school and community closer to one another, which in turn could help ensure that the community takes better care of the buildings and most importantly, sees to it that the children go to school.