IN 2019, the City of Harare hinted on plans to regularise Stoneridge, which is an illegal settlement 15 kilometers South East of the centre of Harare and houses not less than 39 000 households. However, while plans are still underway to formalise settlement and evidence of modern housing and road infrastructure already showing in some parts of Stoneridge where property developers have bought, there still remains a sizable number of people who are still informally settled.
By Michael Gwarisa
Majority of these people lack basic amenities owing to their settlement status. Services such as refuse collection, council piped water, tarred roads, flush toilet systems, electricity and even modern urban houses are a luxury residents of Stoneridge can only encounter when they visit other formal neighborhoods. The lack of these basic services exposes residents of Stonridge to a myriad of health hazards chief among them being waterborne diarrhoeal outbreaks.
The area is characterized by scarcity of water for domestic and potable use, uncollected solid and biodegradable waste. Most people do not have access to hygienic sanitation and therefore large amounts of faecal waste are discharged to the environment without adequate treatment. In the past, the area has been characterised by outbreaks of diarrheal outbreaks such as cholera & typhoid mainly linked to faecal contamination of shallow aquifers and shortages of water.
While the challenges being faced by Stonridge residents are many, a new innovative method of managing waste in an environmentally friendly way has been introduced in the area and is already yielding positive results for the community. Collaborating with the people of Stoneridge, in 2019, the Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF) Zimbabwe launched a two pronged pilot project with 32 households where they sought to deal with biodegradable waste, like food scraps, which can fill up dump sites and water pipes quickly and is expensive to remove using the earthworm technology. Secondly, they objective was recycling wastewater to prevent groundwater contamination and the spread of waterborne diseases like typhoid and cholera. The project was implemented in collaboration with Jojatis.
Gogo Benhilda Mutungira (65), a Stoneridge resident and beneficiary of the project says the project is not only an environmentally friendly way f managing waste but also an income generating project as she now sells organic fertiliser and earthworms to farmers and people who are new to composting
This project is helping us a lot. We used to struggle with garbage and Cholera used to affect us a lot because there were no toilets and proper waste disposal mechanisms. Now we dump our degradable garbage in the composters and non-degradable items we either sell to those who recycle plastic bottles,” said Gogo Mutungila.
Gogo Mutungila’s household is among the 31 households in Stoneridge that have had benefited from the project and have had composters built at their homes. A single composter is divided into five compartments and the are 60 centimetres high and is plastered in and out with some plumbing inside. MSF teams installed composters and supplied the earthworms needed to transform that waste into biofertiliser, called vermicompost.
This is the result of the natural digestion and excretion process of earthworms. So, while bio-waste is reduced, organic fertiliser is produced, which can be used for household food gardens or sold for extra income. Every compartment is connected with a pipe that drains and collects water and deposits it into the collection tank ensure that the composters don’t get waterlogged as it may kill the earthworms. The composters are also covered with lids to avoid direct sunshine which may dehydrate the worms as well prevent rainfall from flooding the cubicles.
The waste decomposition process if odorless and does not produce any flies as earthworms breakdown the degradable matter. Earthworms eat both organic materials and soil particles and discharge them in their faeces in the process supplying nitrogen and make residues of previously applied phosphorus fertiliser available for plants.
“As you can see, there are no flies here, even if you look at my yard, there you don’t see any garbage. Now instead of dumping garbage in the open space, we throw all bio-degradable products such as left over food, fruits, vegetables, sadza etc into this composter and the earthworms will deal with it. When the decomposition is through, we sell the broken down matter as organics fertiliser to farmers.”
Even though they do not have an already established market for their organic fertiliser, she says the money is reasonable as they sell a kilogram of organic fertiliser for US$10 each to any willing buyer. She also applies the fertiliser on her crops which also sells and makes money out of it. Mr Farai Wadawareva a community member who manages the water waste project said the project has transformed attitudes and behaviors of residents in Stiridge especially around waste disposal.
“We allow the material to decompose for at least three weeks or 21 days. We then transfer the staff from apartment number 1 to apartment number 2 then after another three weeks, we transfer from apartment number 2 to apartment number 3 and continue with same cycle up to apartment to number 5. By that time, the staff will be totally decomposed,” said Mr Wadawareva.
Engineer Ignations Takavada, the MSF Zimbabwe Water and Sanitation Supervisor said the waste waste pilot projects aims to reduce the morbidity and mortality linked to acute waterborne diarrhoeal (AWDs) outbreaks linked to contamination of ground water.
“As a pilot project first, we only had 11 houses and we then extended the project to 32 households where composters were built. All the households are connect to the waste water and all households have composters. For the next phase, we reduced the composters because we noticed that the amount of waste is small and they can mange small amounts of waste. The news composter have only three apartments each but they all o the same thing,” said Eng Takavada.
All households from the first phase of the project are connected to the waste water communal treatment project and have decongesters that separate solid waste from water or liquids waste. This is meant to prevent blockage f the system by foreign objects.
