A Look Back at 2022 at Pit Vidura

As we begin a new year of tackling the sanitation crisis across Rwanda, our Pit Vidura team is reflecting on the highs and lows of 2022. Last year began with hope as COVID-19 restrictions were lifted. We were hopeful for a return to normalcy and for the chance to serve more people.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the start of the war ended our short-lived normalcy, and we saw economies across the world become unstable. The increased price of fuel affected Pit Vidura’s business, forcing us to adjust our prices to continue serving the community.

Fortunately, our team didn’t let these challenges stop us. In 2022, we managed to increase the number of customers served by 12% instead of the projected increase of 20%. We have high hopes to continue this trend in 2023, as we have over the past years. Of our over 1100 customers in 2022, 70% were households and 30% were corporate entities.

We were thrilled to acquire a small truck this past year that we modified to be able to carry barrels. This has significantly reduced our need to rent a flatbed truck. In fact, out of 518 jobs completed in areas with narrow roads in 2022, we only hired a flatbed truck 19 times. The small truck also helps us access hard-to-reach places (Check out how, Here). The only downside is an increase in emptying duration when we use a barrel-based method. The team is determined to find a solution to this in the coming year. We hope to optimize our process with the small truck to make it as efficient as a flatbed.

Picture of our modified 5m3 truck using the barrel-based emptying method to serve a customer.

Another accomplishment of 2022 was Pit Vidura’s receipt of a grant from the New Venture Fund which allowed our research and development department to work on various projects. We trained and equipped Forever Sanitation Ltd, a sanitation service provider operating in Kampala, with the necessary tools to collect and share sanitation data. The data collected will be used in a comparative assessment research paper that we look forward to sharing early this year.

Field visit of Pit Vidura R&D lead at Forever Sanitation work site. From left to right: John Businge — Forever Sanitation Managing Director, Katende Latif — Pit emptier, Kawasaki Arafah — Pit Emptier, and Bruce Rutayisire — Pit Vidura R&D Lead.

The grant also enabled us to create educational resources for other fecal sludge management operators as well as those interested in learning how it works. We created and distributed eight education videos demonstrating how we acquire and convert leads to customers, how we provide our services in different areas, and how we maintain our equipment. All of these videos can be found on our You tube channel.

It’s been a fantastic year for the Pit Vidura team, and we’re looking forward to making even more of an impact in 2023. Our plans for the coming year include further knowledge dissemination through research papers and blog posts as well as increasing the number of customers we serve. We’re excited to take all we learned through the challenges and successes of last year to better serve our community in the future.